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

[Chris Shaw]

Your passionate analysis of the situation in Palestine/Israel contains much 
truth. (Also, some factual errors, but correcting these is not crucial for 
the discussion at this point).

What your analysis does not provide is any understanding of what moves the 
average Israeli, or why most of them felt (and still feel) that a state of 
their own was/is a necessity. Most Israelis are neither monsters nor 
fascists. In fact, much of the pre-state population lived on the various 
kibbuzim or moshavim, almost all of them socialist, many communist in 
orientation.  A  famous rabbi (Yeshayahu Lebowitz) who died before the 
second Intifada said that, "Jews were not meant to be the oppressors of 
other peoples". Most Israelis would have agreed with him then and would 
likely do so now. The settler movement is only a small fraction of the 
overall population (and not all are European Jews; at least half are not), 
Sharon's fraction of the Likud does not represent the bulk of the Israeli 
Jewish population. The only reason he can speak for them, the only reason 
that he can use the army to murder Palestinians and continue the occupation 
with all of its horror is that Israelis are simply scared to death. 
Frightened people do horrible things. Frightened Israelis, soldiers and 
non-soldiers alike, carrying out inhumane acts in Palestine mirror exactly 
frightened, angry Palestinians blowing up Israeli kids.  One horror does not 
justify the other.

If you want to use the acts, current and past, inflicted on the Palestinians 
by Israelis as a means of understanding why suicide bombers murder Israelis, 
I can 'understand' this completely. Using the same 'logic' many Israelis and 
others 'understand' why they 'have to' murder and oppress in return. Picking 
a side here does not help if either side continues to justify massacre and 
revenge. You are correct that we have to support Israeli organizations that 
oppose the occupation. The second half of this equation, however, is that we 
can support Palestinan self determination without supporting any form of 
anti-Semitism and the murder of innocents that may some of them may propose.

You state that, "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,..." .

Do you think that if Israel became the just society that many of its own 
people want, if they made a just peace with a Palestinian state that allowed 
the Palestinians to live in freedom and dignity, that anti-Semitism would 
vanish? Maybe in Palestine it would, but for the rest of the world it would 
not. Anti-Semitism is an historical reality that appears to be outside class 
analysis and politics. The social justice movement has to work 'in its own 
backyard' to prevent and denounce it as it as incompatible with social 
justice. Part of 'our' backyard involves the support of many of our members 
for the Intifada and a free Palestine. If we allow our support to be 
constued as accepting killing of innocent Jews in Israel as part of the 
price for the former, we can hardly say that our position on anti-Semitism 
in North America is consistent or moral.



What I was trying to do in the previous message was to evoke some moral 
consistency in the social justice movement. Killing the innocent of either 
side is morally wrong. When it targets Jews because they are Jews who happen 
to live in the State of Israel it is no better than blowing up Palestinian 
kids with tank shells. Neither gets to the underlying historical and social 
roots of the current situation, nor does either allow for any solution. 
Tactically, it is stupid: killing someone's kids only makes the victims more 
enraged and more likely to respond in kind. It serves no purpose besides 
revenge which is a poor basis on which to build just societies in either 
Israel or Palestine.




>
>
>----- 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
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>mobglob-discuss mailing list
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>http://resist.ca/mailman/listinfo/mobglob-discuss




Christopher A. Shaw, Ph.D
Associate Professor
Research Pavilion
828 W. 10th Ave.
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada, V5Z 1L8
tel: 604-875-4111 (ext. 68375)
Fax: 604-875-4376
e-mail: csshawlab at hotmail.com


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