I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
The agency says many are suffering from malnutrition and do not ‘even have the energy to cry’
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, March 17, 2024
The UN’s child relief agency said on Sunday that over 13,000 children
have been killed in the Gaza Strip and that many more could be dead
under the rubble.
“Thousands more have been injured, or we can’t even determine where
they are. They may be stuck under rubble,” said UNICEF Executive
Director Catherine Russell, according to Reuters. “We haven’t seen that
rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.”
Gaza’s Health Ministry has said over 31,000 Palestinians have been
killed in Gaza and has consistently stated that around 70% of the
casualties are women and children.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin previously said over 25,000 women
and children had been killed in Gaza, but the Pentagon walked his
comment back, claiming he was talking about all Palestinians killed.
Russel said that she visited a hospital ward where children were
suffering from severe malnutrition and said the place was quiet because
“the children, the babies … don’t even have the energy to cry.”
Separately, the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, said one in
three children under the age of two in Gaza is now acutely malnourished.
“Children’s malnutrition is spreading fast and reaching unprecedented
levels in Gaza,” UNRWA said. Children have already started to starve to
death in Gaza, with dozens of malnutrition deaths already reported.
Despite the horrific situation and Israel’s continued restrictions on
aid, the US is still providing unconditional military aid to support
the slaughter and starvation campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza has starkly exposed Western governments’
unequal and wholly selective application of international law whilst
also managing to draw much-needed attention to the dysfunctional role
that foreign donors and their development agendas play in the region.
Following Israel’s hitherto unproven allegations, suggesting that members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) played an active role on 7
October, over fifteen Western governments took the draconian decision to
cease funding
of the organisation’s life-saving programmes in Gaza. Erroneous food
package airdrops have subsequently been the order of the day, with
Western states dropping aid
whilst simultaneously supplying the weaponry to the Israeli state that
has been erasing the presence of a starving Palestinian people in the
besieged Gaza Strip.
As the US military prepares to build a pier off the shore of Gaza,
with the alleged purpose of facilitating aid delivery, the
weaponisation of humanitarian intervention has never been laid so bare.
This is at the same time as thousands of trucks laden with aid for the
people of Gaza, ready to deliver essentials amidst this ongoing man-made
catastrophe, remain prohibited from entry by the Israeli authorities.
With more than 1.1 million Palestinians facing emergency levels of food insecurity, the situation is growing beyond desperate by the day.
However, it must be remembered that this is not due to Western
governments’ inability to act or intervene, but rather is due to an
unwillingness to address the root causes of Palestinian suffering and
oppression – a tendency that stems from decades-long application of a
de-contextualised “business-as-usual” approach to humanitarian
intervention. Since the emergence of an oxymoronically named the “peace
process” and the decision to pursue a liberal “peace-building” agenda in
the 1990s, one that centres Western intervention around the proclaimed
goal of achieving a mythical two-state solution, development intervention in the region has been profoundly ineffective, despite high levels of fiscal support.
According to the UN, donors have consistently placed Israel’s
territorial interests and purported security demands, as well as their
own political goals, above the implementation of international law.
Development aid in Palestine has, for decades, failed to be applied on
an equal footing or on a perceived rights-based platform.
In order to try and achieve tangible “development results” despite
the chronic and steadily deepening economic and democratic deficit in
Palestine, organisations like the UN have started to apply a so-called “resilience framework”, a process that a number of scholars and practitioners have shown to be deeply flawed.
The recent decision to engage in tokenistic aid drops from the sky,
despite the outcry from international humanitarian organisations arguing
against their efficacy, is yet further evidence of a deeply problematic
Western intervention strategy in Gaza. Many of these aid drops have
ended up landing in the sea or, in fact, in parts of Israel, whilst
others have failed to deploy their parachutes, killing Palestinian
children on impact. This flawed and impotent intervention serves nothing
more than a photo-op for the sponsors of this ongoing genocide, further
dehumanising Palestinians living in Gaza.
The West’s sponsorship of the genocide in Gaza, in supplying weapons
and political cover for Israel’s actions, alongside its engagement in
ineffective humanitarian interventions that put Palestinian lives at
further risk, is the perfect example of how it has treated the lives and
livelihoods of Palestinians ever since the formation of the Israeli
state in 1948.
In addition to extending the humanitarian crisis by months, building a
“temporary” pier off the coast of Gaza for the purported delivery of
aid could, in effect, work to facilitate “voluntary migration” out of
the Strip. As both the US and Israel have failed to exert pressure on
neighbouring Egypt to open its borders to Palestinians fleeing
starvation and indiscriminate bombing, the pier will conveniently create
an entry point into Gaza that does not border Israel. It is thus far
from cynical to argue that these purported humanitarian interventions
are anything other than a stalling tactic designed to allow the US and
Israel time needed to achieve their ultimate political aims and
objectives – an ethnically cleansed Gaza.
Using aid as a weapon against a besieged population amidst a genocide
shames those in the international donor community and reveals their
deep complicity in crimes against humanity. Development and humanitarian
intervention in Palestine have long been a smokescreen, allowing for
the ongoing oppression and dispossession of Palestinians whilst
simultaneously presenting a sense of feigned concern to onlookers in the
West. Foreign humanitarian intervention in Palestine has been
catastrophic, and the time for a fulsome re-evaluation of the root
causes of humanitarian need has long since passed.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or
Informed Comment.
Hopefully, one day, in a liberated
Palestine, there will be a street to commemorate these brave young men
and women, who taught the world that what is taking place in Palestine
is an injustice that cannot be tolerated.
Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice for the sake of Gaza and Palestine became yesterday’s news too quickly.
Aaron was a cyber defense operation
specialist in the US Airforce and he died at the age of 25 from injuries
sustained when he set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy
in Washington.
The official US army and police conveyed their sympathyto the family, but nothing was mentioned about the background and the cause Aaron was willing to die for.
At best, the incident was described
as a ‘tragic event’. The Pentagon explained that Aaron’s protest was
against the war in Gaza and ignored his main message, blaming the United
States for being complicit in the genocide.
I hope most of us will not be content
with the official response. If we are, it means we disrespect the brave
outcry of this young man and, in that case, his sacrifice will be in
vain.
It was no accident that Aaron
Bushnell donned his military uniform and broadcast live his heroic act
of sacrifice over the internet.
As “an active duty member”, he wrote, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide”. ‘Free Palestine’
This was his main message before dousing himself in a clear liquid and setting himself on fire, crying “Free Palestine”. In the pre-action message, he wrote:
“I am about to engage in an extreme
act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in
Palestine, at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”
I write this piece with trepidation, making sure it does notsound
like encouragement for others to go to that extreme – but find it
difficult not to admire Aaron’s bravery acknowledged by the resistance
movement in Gaza that praised the American pilot who:
“Immortalized his name as a defender
of human values and the plight of the Palestinian people, who are
oppressed by the American administration and its unjust policies.”
An Important Message
Aaron’s message is simple and clear:
the US is complicit in the first-ever televised genocide in modern
times. And if you serve in the American administration or army, thenyou, too, are complicit.
The physical venue where the
complicity is translated into actual collaboration is, indeed, the
Israeli embassy in Washington, and this is why Aaron decided to protest
there.
Other parts of Aaron’s message need to be repeated and echoed by many of us.
He asked whether decent people should
have been quiet during slavery in America, or during Apartheid in South
Africa. Or everywhere in the world throughout history, when people
sacrificed their lives in the struggle for justice?
Aaron was unable to stop the American complicity in the genocide, but he hoped that it would not go unnoticed.
But it is not only the message of Aaron’s self-sacrifice that is so important. His persona was equally crucial.
Everyone who knew him remembered him for “his
kindness, gentleness, thoughtfulness”. A friend told reporters that he
was “the kindest, gentlest, silliest little kid in the Air Force” and
“one of the most principled comrades”.
The day before his self-immolation,
he sent a will to his friend, gave his cat to a neighbor and mentioned
to his friend that his fridge was full for them to enjoy.
We Need You
It is important to know who Aaron was, as the tendency is to describe young men like him as insane, fanatics or zealots.
The truth is Aaron was a healthy
person who felt so helpless as to be part of an institution that is
complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians. He was a sensitive person who sacrificed his life, hoping this would send a message.
We shall beseech people not to take these extreme measures. We need them on the streets, at the protests. We need them to quit positions
and jobs to demonstrate their humanity in the face of a genocide that is
televised to us on an hourly basis, one that is still ongoing.
Aaron was ready to face future challenges in life. He was actively pursuing a bachelor’s degree in software engineering fromthe
Western Governors University. Also, he had earlier engaged in
coursework related to software development at the Southern New Hampshire
University and computer science at the University of Maryland Global
Campus, according to the information on his LinkedIn profile.
The mainstream media in the US asked
how come a young man who loved the Lord of the Rings and karaoke would
do something so extreme. They defined it as a mystery.
The answer for them was not
Palestine, but Aaron’s association with the religious group, a cult he
belonged to as a child and that allegedly mistreated its members. The explanation US media provided
was that when you leave a tight-knit group, you find it hard to belong
elsewhere. Maybe this is true, but still, it does not explain Aaron’s
act of self-sacrifice.
He did not do this because he was a lost soul.
To the contrary, the fact that he had
experienced injustice, pushed him – in the words of his close friends
– to try and “defend those who don’t care or can’t defend themselves”.
This is why he looked for ways of being a social activist for just causes.
Aaron is Not Alone
Mainstream media in the US refuses to accept Aaron’s, and many other young Americans’ perceptionof
the injustice in Palestine as equal to that experienced by slaves in
America, or the victims of American imperialism in Vietnam.
But more and more young Americans
realize that the US policy is one of the major reasons for the ongoing
suffering of the Palestinians. Many more will be aware of it now.
Aaron was not a superficial observer. He felt uneasy being in the army
and began, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, to research the
history of violence inflicted by the US, both domestically – against its
own citizens – and across the world, against others.
His soul-searching led him to consider leaving the army. His dream of a career was strongly associated with a wish to earn enough money to help the just causes he believed in.
It is not only Aaron that we should not forget. We still do not know the name and
identity of the brave woman who set herself on fire in front of the
Israeli consulate in Atlanta last December. Even in that case, a
Palestinian flag was found at the scene.
Aaron reminds us of Norman
Morrison who did the same in front of the offices of Robert McNamara,
the most senior American politician responsible for the devastation of
Vietnam in the mid-1960s.
And there were others in the US, such
as Wyne Alan Bruce, who set himself on fire in April 2022 in
Washington, on Earth Day, as a form of protest against international
inaction in the face of environmental catastrophes, including climate
change.
And beyond the US, we all remember
Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in 1963, in
protest against the pro-American South Vietnamese persecution of
Buddhist monks.
And we also remember Mohamed Bouaziz,
the Tunisian food trader who, in his act of sacrifice, triggered what
became known as the Arab Spring.
Inquiring a bit deeper, I was
surprised to learn that hardly anyone in the US military voiced concern,
let alone criticism, about the American involvement in the Israeli
genocide in Gaza. Therefore, one can understand how lonely Aaron must have felt.
I wish we could all have talked to Aaron and told him that we could have used his expertise for the cause we all believe in.
But the least we could do now is to remember him.
And hopefully, one day, in a
liberated Palestine, there will be a street to commemorate these brave
young men and women, who taught the world that what is taking place in
Palestine is an injustice that cannot be tolerated.
– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the
University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political
science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern
Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. He is the
co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision
for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’
who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government
documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of
Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine
Chronicle.
The Biden administration has been able to maintain a low profile by spreading arms provision to Israel across more than 100 smaller munitions sales — allowing the president to posture as a peacekeeper while US weapons wipe Gaza off the map.
In the one hundred fifty days after October 7, Israel killed thirty-one thousand Palestinians, injured seventy-two thousand, displaced 1.7 million, and razed or damaged more than half of Gaza’s buildings. Joe Biden sent over one hundred weapons shipments to Israel during the same stretch. In a recent classified briefing, US officials told members of Congress that the Biden administration approved and delivered more than one hundred separate weapons sales to Israel in the one hundred fifty days after October 7, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid,” the Washington Postreported on Wednesday. That works out to one new arms deal every thirty-six hours, on average.
These transfers are classified as sales, but very few of them meet that definition in the conventional sense. The vast majority are funded through State Department grants. Biden made just two of these publicly funded sales to Israel public, and the only reason he did is because he had to. Section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the president to notify Congress when a proposed arms sale exceeds a certain value. The notification threshold depends on the type of matériel (for “significant military equipment” it’s $14 million; for other military articles and services, $50 million; for military construction services, $200 million), but also the recipient. For NATO countries and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Israel, the notification thresholds for these three categories are considerably higher ($25 million, $100 million, and $300 million, respectively).
While Biden is loud and proud about arming Ukraine, he prefers to arm Israel in secret. The quantity of sales since October 7 is case in point. By spreading his military support for Israel across more than one hundred sales, Biden kept pretty much all of them “under threshold” per the AECA, thereby avoiding congressional and public scrutiny. Biden might have picked up this trick from his predecessor. Donald Trump exploited the same loophole to dodge oversight on arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose intense and indiscriminate bombing of Yemen at the time had created a dire humanitarian crisis.
Keeping these transfers out of public view makes it easier for Biden to cast himself as Humanitarian of the Year in Gaza while going great lengths to help Israel destroy it. Biden’s series of food airdrops suggests he’s bravely trying to fix a catastrophe beyond his control. Administration officials perpetuate this narrative by insisting the president has no leverage over Israel. “There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate to other countries’ sovereign decisions,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller recently said.
This is wrong. The catastrophe in Gaza is the result of a deliberate policy choice Biden made. Israel’s military offensive would not be possible without him fast-tracking such vast quantities of weapons to its arsenal over the last several months. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted that Israel’s assault on Gaza relies on a steady stream (a torrent, in fact) of US weapons, once telling a group of local government officials, “We need three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions.” From October 7 to mid-February, Biden had delivered twenty-one thousand bombs to Israel, and Israel had already dropped half of them.
Netanyahu structured an urgent plea to US lawmakers in November in a similar way: “I need ammo, ammo, and ammo — yesterday,” he said and specifically requested 155 mm artillery shells. More than thirty aid and advocacy groups had urged the Biden administration not to supply this ammunition because the shells are unguided, highly explosive (with a casualty radius of 100 to 300 meters) and have been used by Israel in the past to hit hospitals, schools, shelters, and safe zones. Biden transferred 57,021 of them to Israel a few weeks later. The Israeli army announced in early December that it had fired more than one hundred thousand shells since its ground invasion of Gaza began on October 27, adding that artillery plays a “central role” by providing “intense fire cover” for its troops.
Israel lacks the production capacity to prosecute one of the deadliest, most intense bombing campaigns in history relying only on its own munitions. Israel’s assault on Gaza continues because Biden thinks it should continue. If he thought otherwise, he would shut down the weapons pipeline he constructed to enable it.
In a recent poll, 52 percent of Americans said the United States should halt weapons transfers to Israel, while only 27 percent said they should continue. Among 2020 Biden voters, the margin was 62 to 14 percent.
An
unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from
Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has
Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reutersreported on 9 March.
The testimonies are contained in a report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reviewed by Reuters and dated February 2024.
"Agency
staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli
authorities while in detention and pressured to make false statements
against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with
Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023
atrocities," the report says.
The
report included allegations of abuse and torture in Israeli detention,
including severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm
to family members.
Though waterboarding is widely viewed as torture by human rights groups, the Reuters report described Israeli actions only as "coercion" and "pressure" to force detained Palestinians to make false statements.
In
addition to describing the torture of UNRWA employees, the report
stated that Israel has subjected Palestinian detainees more broadly to
beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, and sexual violence. Some
detainees have also died after Israel denied them medical treatment, the
report added.
UNRWA
communications director Juliette Touma said the agency planned to hand
the information in the 11-page, unpublished report to human rights
investigators at UN agencies and outside rights groups.
"When the war comes to an end there needs to be a series of inquiries to look into all violations of human rights," she said.
Amid the torture and medical neglect, 27 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war on 7 October.
Israel
has accused UNRWA employees of participation in the 7 October Hamas
attack on Israeli settlements and military bases. Israel provided no
evidence for the claim, but 16 countries, including the US, paused $450
million in UNRWA funding in response, throwing its aid operations into
crisis just as starvation was beginning to grip Gaza.
Israel's campaign against UNRWA is part of a broader campaign started
years ago to dismantle the agency, which helps keep the hope of
Palestinian refugees returning to their stolen lands and homes in what
is now Israel alive.
President Joe Biden is expected to announce during his State of the
Union address Thursday night that the U.S. military will construct a
temporary port on Gaza’s coastline to facilitate the delivery of
humanitarian assistance, a plan that critics said is a far cry from
what’s needed to end Israel’s forced starvation of the enclave’s
population.
It’s expected to take up to two months for large aid packages to
begin flowing through the seaport, which a White House official said would be able to “receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to demand Israel let in aid right now while Palestinian children are literally being starved to death?” asked
Josh Ruebner, an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University and former
policy director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “Waiting
45-60 days to build a temporary pier doesn’t help Palestinians starving
to death today.”
“Besides, how are you going to offload the aid from the pier to the
land given that Israel shoots at Palestinian boats all the time?”
Ruebner continued. “And even if you get the aid to land, how does it get
distributed to those most in need? Maybe you should have thought about
that before you cut off aid to UNRWA, the only agency able to distribute
aid throughout the Gaza Strip.”
The White House said Thursday that in addition to the aid port, it
will “continue to work to increase the amount of aid flowing through
existing border crossings at Rafah and Kerem Shalom.” The administration
also said the Israeli government, at the request of the U.S., has
“prepared a new land crossing directly into northern Gaza,” which Israel
has mostly cut off from aid for months—causing children to starve to death.
“All of these efforts in order to avoid what actually matters: Stopping the war,” responded Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Pathetic.”
Biden’s port announcement will come days after the U.S. began
airdropping aid into Gaza as Israel continued obstructing ground
deliveries and attacking aid convoys. According to the United Nations, 150 aid trucks at most are reaching Gaza daily—half of the bare minimum needed.
“Israel has mounted a starvation campaign against the Palestinian
people in Gaza,” Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the
right to food, said Thursday.
“The aid that his administration is trying to get into Gaza can’t get
through Israel’s blockade. Instead of announcing a total arms
embargo—or at least until Israel allows aid to get in!—he is building a
port.”
Aid that arrives at the temporary U.S. port will be routed through Cyprus and “will undergo prior inspection by Israel,” The Washington Postreported, raising concerns that Israel will impede the maritime shipments just as it has done with ground shipments.
U.S. officials claimed the port operation would not require any
American troops on the ground but “did not provide details about how the
pier would be built,” The Associated Pressreported. “One noted that the U.S. military has ‘unique capabilities’ and can do things from ‘just offshore.'”
Human rights groups and aid workers have implored the U.S. to exert
pressure on the Israeli government—including by cutting off arms
sales—to end its suffocating blockade, allow aid to flow freely through
land crossings, and support a lasting cease-fire.
“Biden is sending Israel a new shipment of weapons every 36 hours,” said
Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of the progressive Jewish advocacy group
IfNotNow. “The aid that his administration is trying to get into Gaza
can’t get through Israel’s blockade. Instead of announcing a total arms
embargo—or at least until Israel allows aid to get in!—he is building a
port.”
Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians, wrote
on social media that “the infrastructure required to get aid to those
who need it in Gaza already exists, the problem is just that Israel
keeps attacking and obstructing it.”
“We need accountability, not more harebrained headline-chasing
schemes,” Talbot added. “Literally nobody on the ground is advocating
for this. They want you to stop providing the bombs doing the damage.”
Arguments over whether Israelis or Palestinians count as “really
indigenous” are beside the point. No one’s human rights should depend on
their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors come from.
Claudia Tenney is a congresswoman from upstate New York. Much of her
district (NY-24) was, for centuries before “New York state” came into
existence, the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy.
A right-wing Republican, Tenney presumably doesn’t think much of land
acknowledgments or hand-wringing about the idea that NY-24 sits on
“stolen land.”
And yet, Tenney is in the news this week for introducing something called the RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria Act.
She wants to require that US government documents stop referring to the
Israeli-occupied West Bank as the “West Bank” and start calling it
“Judea and Samaria.” She claims that “the term ‘West Bank’” is “used to
delegitimize Israel’s historical claim to this land.”
The idea seems to be that, because ancient Jewish kingdoms were
located there thousands of years ago, and Israeli Jews are descendants
of the people who lived in those kingdoms, Palestinian rights are
irrelevant. It’s a bit like an extremely high-stakes diplomatic land
acknowledgment.
Tenney is far from the only one on the Right thinking this way as
Israel rains death and destruction on the civilian population of Gaza
and pogroms by Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank.
At a recent appearance at the Cambridge Union in the UK, conservative
pundit Ben Shapiro argued
that Israel is “the ultimate case of decolonization in human history
after return of a native population to its homeland and battle to throw
off the shackles of the British Empire.”
There’s surely an element of trolling in Shapiro’s use of this
language. Since when does he care about “decolonization” anywhere else?
But he’s deadly serious about his support for the status quo in
Israel/Palestine. He recently claimed,
for example, that a Palestinian state would be an unacceptable
“terrorist entity on Israel’s borders.” And I seriously doubt that
Shapiro wants the five million or so Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza to be granted Israeli citizenship, which would make Israel no
longer a specifically “Jewish state” but a multiethnic democracy with
roughly equal numbers of Jewish and Palestinian citizens.
So presumably he wants those millions of people to continue to be
denied basic rights — to continue to be tried in military courts instead
of real courts when they’re accused of crimes, for example, and to
continue to be unable to vote their rulers out of office. And the
justification for that would have to be the one cited by Congresswoman
Tenney: Israel’s “historical claim” to the land.
There’s also a misguided — and, I hope, relatively small — segment of
Palestine solidarity activists who take the mirror image of this
position. They’re rightly horrified by the denial of democratic rights
to the Palestinians, and especially by the mass starvation and
indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, where the Israeli military has displaced
at least 85 percent
of the population from their homes since October. This anger leads them
to indulge in ugly rhetoric about how the entire population of seven
million or so Israeli Jews, the great majority of whom were born in the
country, are “settlers” and “colonizers.” I’ve seen social media posts,
for example, where pictures of stereotypically “white”-looking Israeli
Jews with European-sounding surnames are used to mock the idea that
Israelis are “indigenous to the Middle East.”
The implication happens to be wrong. On at least some estimates,
Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors once lived in Northern or Eastern
Europe, make up less than a third
of Israel’s Jewish population. They’re greatly outnumbered by Israeli
Jews whose ancestors lived in various Middle Eastern countries during
the same time period and who often had to flee from those countries in
the twentieth century. But this kind of rhetoric isn’t just wrong
because it’s based on a shaky understanding of the facts. It’s deeply
wrong in principle.
The great German socialist thinker August Bebel famously said that
antisemitism is “the socialism of fools,” since antisemites tend to
scapegoat cabals of “Jewish bankers” for the problems of an entire
economic system. To tweak Bebel’s observation a bit, this kind of
rhetoric about all Israelis being “settlers” whose presence in their
country is illegitimate represents the anti-Zionism of fools. Zionism
should be rejected because ethnostates are wrong in principle. No
nation-state should be a state “of” a specific ethnic or religious
subset of its residents, and the most just solution would be a single secular democratic state with equal rights for everyone.
People who insist that Palestinians are “indigenous” and Israelis are
not, and who think this is what makes the struggle for Palestinian
rights legitimate, are embracing the logic of reactionaries like Tenney
and Shapiro while reversing the implication. The problem with the
Right’s claim that Israel is justified in denying basic rights to
millions of people because of historical Jewish claims to “Judea and
Samaria” is not that the right-wingers are misidentifying who
counts as “truly” indigenous. The wildly reactionary premise is that
this is even a relevant question.
The Iroquois Confederacy probably came together somewhere between five hundred and nine hundred years ago, depending on which estimates you believe. The tribes that made it up were already there before that, and presumably before they
were there, other groups lived in the same area. Humans have lived
there for about ten thousand years. It was wrong to displace the
Iroquois, and if their ancestors displaced some earlier group, that was
wrong too. Whatever injustices fill the history books, though, everyone
except for outright racists and fascists takes it for granted that
everyone who lives there now should have equal rights now, regardless of
any ethnic group’s “historical claims.” The exact same principle should
apply to Israel/Palestine.
Even someone as rabidly right-wing as Tenney would presumably grant
that everyone in her district should have democratic rights, regardless
of whether their ancestors lived in the Iroquois Confederacy or their
great-great-grandparents came to New York from Ireland in the 1800s or
they’re first-generation immigrants who take their citizenship test last
week. And anyone who can acknowledge that should also
recognize that no one in Israel/Palestine should be denied rights based
on their ancestors having lived in the wrong place — whether “wrong”
ancestry means not being descended from ancient Judeans and Samarians or
not having great-great-grandparents who lived in Palestine before the
formation of the state of Israel.
The problem with Zionism is that it’s obscene for anyone’s status or
rights in the area where they live to depend on their ethnicity or
religion or where their ancestors lived. Zionism should be rejected not
because we think Palestinians have a better claim than Israeli Jews to a
blood-and-soil connection to the land, but on the basis of the
universalist principles that have always formed the rock-solid normative
basis of the socialist movement and, before that, were proclaimed by
the French Revolutionaries in 1789.
Those principles say that everyone is entitled to the same package of
rights, just for being a human being. Socialists think that package
includes the right to have your material needs met and the right to have
a say in the economic decisions that touch your life. But even liberals
believe in a set of universal rights that are clearly inconsistent with
displacing anyone from their homes or denying anyone a democratic say
in the political institutions that govern them because they come from
the “wrong” ethnic background.
Many actually existing liberals are woefully inconsistent in their
application of these principles, especially when it comes to
Israel/Palestine. But the principles themselves are correct, and
sticking to them is the only way out of interminable and deadly land
feuds.
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Contributor
Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at
Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give
Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently
Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He
Still Matters.