[mobglob-discuss] anti-Semitism in all its forms

[Macdonald Stainsby]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Shaw" <csshawlab at hotmail.com>
> The recent attacks (a minimum of 6 others since Wednesday) go far beyond the
> support for the right of the Palestinian people to live in freedom and
> dignity. Blowing up Jewish civilians because they are Jews is the purest
> form of anti-Semitism. There is never a moral justification for such a crime
> against Jews, or anyone else.

First off, when anti-Semitism appears in two places, one: your backyard, and
two: the Middle East- the first place you deal with it is in your backyard. So,
if this discussion is not to get into First World chauvinism, we must start by
cleaning up our own ranks- getting rid of content in "our" publications which
carries known anti-Semitic materials (or, indeed, disassociating ourselves from
the paper entirely)-- but it also means having a look into the organisational
forms of anti-semitism in BC, for example. In today's Canada, these far-right
anti-Semites work together more than in the past out of necessity. We should use
their meetings as a roll-call of the far-right and be willing to call people to
account for why they would associate with such groups. But so far as the
conflict in the Middle East, it is a different matter than it is here-
anti-Semitism isn't a pure paranoia for a Palestinian!

Well, a few things are needed to put this kind of statement into context. The
Apartheid regime in Israel has created an inhuman situation, one where the
population of what will someday be Palestine (the 22% outside of the Greenline)
has to spend the few hours they get outside of the curfew (for most of the time
of existence right now, the entire population of Palestinians in the Occupied
Territories live under house arrest, people who leave their homes get shot at by
tank mortar-shells, including children going to get chocolate) getting a
solitary bucket of almost-clean water, to use to survive until the next lifting
of the curfew. Then there is how the 22% of the map isn't really even that, but
more like 12%, none of it connected directly to the rest. It is all controlled
even few hundred meters by checkpoints controlled by an army infested by a form
of white-supremacy. The Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories-- sitting on
land that not even the USA recognises as their legal property, but instead is
purely a stolen mass, never mind Israel proper. It is truly impossible to
explain what the Siege is like, really. Anyone (and our "new" movement of the
last few years produces more and more) who actually has seen the occupation
always speaks of it in the most stunned manner. Palestine, as many former
anti-Apartheid strugglers from South Africa, suffers under a racism, brutality
and humiliation that makes the Afrikaners look better- as Desmond Tutu pointed
out, two things: Jews everywhere in the world have always been at the forefront
of struggles for justice and equality, particularly in Africa. Thus, it hurts
far more and confuses more to see what Zionism does in the Middle East, and
associates itself with Judaism-- and the greater crime is how many Jewish people
fall for this emotional manipulation, turning a historically liberational people
into occupiers, racists and white supremacists far too often. Yet, the best hope
for peace -- the only peace that means anything means a justice filled one--
comes from anti-occupation groups that emanate from both sides of the conflict.

 Recently, I had the honour of chairing a small get-together of some of our
local anti-capitalist activists with two amazing women from a group called
Ta'ayush, or "living together" (if memory serves me correctly). One woman was an
Israeli, the other was a Palestinian-- and they were two very inspiring folks.
What their organisation does involves going to the "non-existent" villages that
still exist in Israel. A "non-existent" village means one that wasn't ethnically
cleansed like so many were during the creation of the settler-state of Israel,
but receives absolutely nothing in terms of amenities for water, electricity,
schools, roads-- nothing because the people living there are Arab. That's a form
of Apartheid. So Ta'ayush goes to these villages and creates (with their small
resources) some small level of infrastructure. During the attacks on Jenin, they
could do nothing, being blocked by the army when they tried to bring in
humanitarian supplies.

Another Desmond Tutu pointed out was that not even the White supremacist
government of South Africa ever took the tanks into the ghettoes and the
townships. They wouldn't risk that. However the Israeli Offense Force invades
alley ways, refugee camps and the entire map of Palestine as though it were on
the way to lunch daily.

In these kinds of circumstances, where 1000kg bombs are dropped on a residential
neighbourhood and it gets called "a great success", where there are but two
options in the mind of many Palestinian are surrender or to do whatever makes
Israel know they will not make Palestine disappear, then if we can't condone it
we can certainly understand it-- and we can lay the blame, 100% of it, at the
feet of the occupation. The analogy between Al Qaeda and the Palestinians is
made regularly by Ariel Sharon, but it doesn't wash. The desperation of the
situation in Palestine today is such that it defies explanation- but it gets
worse when we realise the goal of the Israeli state is to ultimately expel the
remainder of the population. During the re-occupation after the start of the
Intifada, what we have seen is the re-directing of 80% of the waterways of
Palestine to Israeli Settler hands, in the Middle East itself that's a genocidal
act. The home demolitions have become more than daily. What happens when the
Israeli army moves into a neighbourhood to "find militants"? (first off: they
need to realise that their occupation has made it so the entire population of
Palestine, in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is now a "militant" to one
level or another) They bull-doze every home in the area. After they went through
the refugee camps in Jenin-- by attacking these homes, these were now people who
had been refugees three times. No matter where they go, what they build,
ultimately "Jews" come in and bulldoze it. In response, some families simply put
tents on the rubble of what was once their homes: "You will not drive us out"
was the point, clearly. I use the quotation marks to underscore how it ends up
being played over and over in the mind.

The greatest threat today to the revitalization of anti-Semitism is the
Occupation of Palestine and the continued murder of their people. Even with
horrendous death tolls of Israeli citizens due to suicide bombs the number of
dead is still four Palestinians for every Israeli. The entire infrastructure,
hospitals, roads, prisons, and particularly homes are being demolished inside
Palestine in a way that most Israelis could not even fathom. Yes, suicide
bombings are brutal and they kill indiscriminately. If you want the Palestinian
people to resist like human beings, they must be treated as such. One of the
most stomach turning things I ever saw in my life was during an incursion into
the West Bank. I saw the IDF, which by law must be Jewish only, writing numbers
on the arms of Palestinians. To see Jewish people do that to another people was
one of the most crude forms of irony in history. Nothing has ever matched the
pure evil of the Nazi machine that came up with the concept of numbers on the
arm. I almost threw up when the Israelis began this practice.

I think in the context of such an absolutely repulsive state machinery ("the
Jewish state", where there are laws using religion to determine citizens, to
allow the "right of return" to a Jewish man born in, say, Whitehorse but who had
never seen Israel- yet bans Palestinians born inside the Green Line, etc.) that
has the nerve to associate itself with the history of the Jewish people-- two
things can be done in North America to fight anti-Semitism. One, anti-semtism
was once called the "anti-capitalism of fools" in Europe. That was because
people were often anti-Semitic when what they were trying to vent was a class
hatred-- and they saw a Jewish face often and were won over to a belief that
this had something to do with their oppression (recall the "Jewish banking
conspiracy" bull-shit). Today, imperialism is the primary oppressor of the human
race, and one flash point where we see both white supremacy (in European Jewish
Settlers- more than half of the illegal settler population has been brought in
to displace the Palestinians in less than the last decade, another part of the
slow genocide of everything Palestinian.) and settler-colonialism in the
starkest way is Israel. Someone recently called Middle Eastern anti-Semitism
"the anti imperialism of fools", and I couldn't have said it better myself if I
spent weeks trying.

Israel also paints itself "the Jewish state" and as such people like scum bags
in Lyndon LaRouche, The National Alliance (who are now posting to IndyMedia in
Vancouver, by the way) must be fought twice as hard. So long as Israel carries
out racist policies supposedly in the name of another race, anti-Semites will be
trying to use this to their advantage and recruit with this righteous
indignation as a leverage point. If we are to mean anything to anyone that
aspires to rise above this, we must clearly expel these types from our ranks as
fast as possible, not even giving a word of debate to them. We, here in North
America, face a unique problem because of the spread of wealth having large
numbers of Jewish people in the ruling class, in the American Senate, Hollywood
etc... and all of that makes for great optics to those who would try to make a
conspiracy out of anything. In such a case, we can only counter pose that the
Christian ruling class is as anti-Semitic as any- but wholly pro-Zionist! Nixon
used to rant about Jewish control of the media for example, (to Billy Graham in
a recently declassified discussion) but he gave massive support to Israel both
financially and politically. Zionists are quite willing to work with
anti-Semites, so long as they are pro-Zionists. In other words, we must counter
pose a class analysis to any racial one and allow no anti-Semites in our ranks,
not a soft one, not a closed one, not a single person who has openly worked with
known anti-Semites. This must be our policy as this is our yard-- so far as the
yard in Israel/Palestine, I agree it is infested with anti-Semitism, and the
only way that we can break it down is to repeat what we already know: The
occupation is doomed, the only truly Jewish answer in Israel today is among the
Refuseniks who will not serve in the territories, that those who put themselves
between "their" army and the Palestinian people redeem so much of what happens
in that area, and that the 2nd World War is as clearly being put to the test as
any other time: did we learn the lessons from history? Will we as the human race
say never again? Will Palestine be defended by humanity everywhere? That is the
answer to anti-Semitism.

Victory to the Intifada.

 The title of a book I loaned a Jewish Friend recently sums it up for me:
"The end of Zionism and the liberation of the Jewish People".

Resistance takes on the shape of how desperate the situation is for the
resister. What does that tell us about what it is to be Palestinian these days?

Macdonald