I felt impelled to answer a friend who posted about the conflict in Gaza. This is what I wrote. I hope it is useful to those of you who have have found it hard to take a position, or who have wanted to reply to friends who you feel have taken a position on Gaza that you cannot accept. Please feel free to share. ------------ Dear Ben Im afraid this will not be an easy read. Ive given a fair amount of thought to whether or not to reply to your post and Ive come to the conclusion that I cant let it rest. I understand your post as speaking from the heart and I recognise its sincerity. Which is in turn why I need to ask you to search further into understanding why I find your post disturbing, deeply violent and dangerous, albeit subtly. I have a hope that this will not be the beginning of a slanging match but rather the beginning of a shift, which really speaks to the first point I think should be tackled in relation to your post, and that is the issue of timing. Which is to say that while you say you have been saddened by the lack of nuance in the opinions of people whose general ethical stance and intelligence you respect, I have been saddened by how much your apparent display of nuance masks a clear Israeli bias at precisely the moment massacres are being committed. I confess that I find little nuance in massacres, or at least what nuance there is in massacres could never lead me to advise my friends to refrain from comment on it, or try to understand more from both sides before stating a position in public. I ask you with equal sincerity and heart, if not now, with over 1500 dead, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, over 300 hundred of them children, hospitals attacked, schools destroyed, entire neighbourhoods decimated and hundreds of thousands displaced in a tiny strip of land already under siege and blockade, then when Ben? When? The shocking advice being laid out in your post is to heed the apparent complexity and refrain from comment, not stating a position in public while the scale of violence exceeds its recent history. I shudder to think what Israel would be doing to Gaza and to itself if there were not a worldwide outcry right now at what it is doing. I really shudder to think. Nuance and complexity should be applied in the service of justice, not in the service of obfuscation or killing. And yes, despite the fact that I believe you hope for an end to violence. Despite the fact that I believe you when you say the occupation of the Palestinian people and the blockade of Gaza are wrong. Despite the fact that I believe you when you say the Israeli settlement project is wrong and must be ended, and as far as possible reversed. I believe the position you express - not you - is the most dangerous form of apology for the slaughter of children on both sides, not on one side or the other but both. The reason I say so is not because your position is stated extremely, but because it hand-wringingly justifies the paradigm of thought underlying the violence of this conflict. If one cannot get beyond its mystifying logic one either ends by justifying Israeli violence as tragically necessary, or feels they have no right to comment, or worst of all vapidly hopes for an end to violence as if holding hands and saying were all human beings, if only we could see that we all want to live in peace was the answer, rather than an essential part of the problem. Sound peculiar? Let me explain what I mean. Nobody in the world doesnt hope for peace. Netanyahu does, Khaled Meshaal does, Bush does, Bin Laden did, Blair does, Saddam did, in fact every single psychopath that has blighted the world hopes for peace. The question is peace on what terms. Peace on terms that are built on institutionalising extraordinary injustice, or peace that is built on equality and justice? Sadly, peace and stability are words more often used to justify violence than prevent it. They are words abused to mean one persons peace over an anothers. One persons stability over anothers. One persons security over anothers. Put another way, the person who uses the word peace abusively is really saying why cant I live exactly the way I am now in peace without seeing that fundamental to the way they are living now is the complete disenfrachisement, murder, and dispossession of another. Instead of understanding that, one just wishes the problem could go away, got over despite acknowledging it, or worst of all be insulated against with the threat of violence or the awesome power of an iron dome or apartheid wall. Justice, Ben. Justice. The scale of injustice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not comparable, nor has it ever been, and I also know this conflict well. The killing has always been comparable, though not the numbers. The violence has always been comparable, though not the scale. The injustice has never been comparable. On a global historical scale yes, in a local context never. Which goes to the heart of a beautiful sentence I heard recently, from a professor called Alan Sokal: You can come out of the Holocaust and say never again will it happen to us, or you can come out of the Holocaust and say never again will it happen to anyone. No colonial movement, no apartheid regime, no ideological framework that gives some people their rights and denies them to others operates on a scale of comparable justice. Which is why I cannot and will not ever consider a position which encourages people to be quiet at a time like this, or think again before opening their mouth, to be the centre ground. It is not. It is deeply implicated in violence. Which is to say you are right. The word genocide is inappropriate in the context of a mere 1400 dead in a matter of weeks. But it is less inappropriate in the context of over 60 years of ethnic cleansing (I use that word as carefully as many Israeli historians), dispossession, murder, imprisonment and denial of the most basic of human rights. And yes the current war in Gaza is a further expression of that. The first step to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is recognising the core injustice at the heart of it all, not treating it as something to be dealt with as an unfortunate legacy from the past still being argued over in the present. No, it is a legacy that is alive and killing. And so the first action in recognising the change that is necessary is exactly marching under the banner of a Free Palestine that you so dismissively denigrate, because without freedom for Palestinians this conflict will never end nor should it, just as without freedom for slaves the fight for slavery should never end and indeed hasnt, just as without equal rights the fight for equal rights should never end and indeed hasnt. For me, these are pillars without nuance. In situations of injustice, there is the oppressor and the oppressed. Sure, both of them can have a hard time of it. It certainly isnt easy oppressing a people or a nation. But that has nothing to do with justice, or an equal sense of sides. Palestine is not oppressing Israel. Im afraid that hidden in the logic of your argument is a constant return to the importance of Israeli security. And so what you constantly miss is the fact that Israelis will never feel secure without justice for Palestinians, not unless they annihilate the Palestinians or entirely disarm them of their capacity to fight - the only non-solutions you rightly decide are dead ends. Which brings me to the thorniest issue in all this, which is Hamas. I hope its no surprise to you that I am a fervent opponent of Hamas and their entire brand of political ideology. I believe they are part of a violent self-serving political organisation whose strategic interests will never be aligned with justice of any kind for any one. But I make a significant distinction between my condemnation of them as a corrupt, dictatorial power within a Palestinian context, and my condemnation of their violence in an Israeli-Palestinian context. I will not let one be instrumentalised to serve the other. My condemnation of Hamas and its rockets or its abuse of its own people does not and could never justify the Israeli occupation or its calcutedly barbaric assaults on Palestine and Palestinians. That said the most important question I ask myself is not how and why I condemn Hamas, but how I get rid of them, or limit their power. What I know is that the answer will never be at the barrel of a gun. Just as it is not in Egypt. Just as it is not in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Europe for that matter. More than anything else, it is the millions of innocent people who have been killed in our region in the name of fighting terrorism that has fed the growth of violent political Islam. Its too much to get into my interpretation of the rise of political islam in its many colours, all of which I am against. But I will say that its most effective ally has always been oppression. The greater the oppression the more effectively organised it becomes as an opposition organised around violence. In turn the oppressor becomes more brutal in anticipation or reaction to that violence, and so the cycle continues. But the oppressor remains the oppressor. If you really ask me where the solution lies to this conflict Im afraid I dont believe it lies in Palestine. I believe it lies in Israeli consciousness. I dont know when it will come, but I know that it is on the rise. And really when I extend my hand out to you I do so asking you to recognise that we will only step out of this conflict when your people accept that there is no way in which the violence of their oppression of Palestinians can or will ever be normalised. None. It is not an issue of making a deal. It is an issue of equal rights. I believe that will take us to a single state eventually, I have no idea when, but the two state solution is dead. Israel killed it a long time ago. You only have to look at the threadbare image of whats left even of 67 Palestine to see how unviable the facts on the ground have become. No one is going anywhere. I leave you with this video, which I will link to in the comments. Its from a documentary thats being made about American Jews who take a very moving stand against Israel. Its called Some of my Best Friends are Zionists. It is in people like these that I find my hope. BDS is a tool. It is not the solution. It is a tool to help force an awakening and build a movement. I believe our duty as citizens of this world is to hold violent power accountable wherever we encounter it. International law has proved irrelevant to the Israeli war machine. Diplomacy has proved irrelevant to the Israeli war machine. The so-called peace process has proved irrelevant. Israel is even trying to make war irrelevant. The only front on which it is losing right now, finally, is world public opinion. And if we work hard now that might just be the beginning of a shift in consciousness inside and outside Israel. BDS is not about preventing dialogue, it is about making the space in which it can happen, holding up a mirror to someone who refuses to see it as anything but glass.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 13:48:57 +0000
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