Cruising for a bruising? Critiquing the British Zionist movement (while trans)
JVL Introduction
In a Verso Blogpost Hil Aked discusses Friends of Israel, a carefully researched account of the activities of Israel’s advocates in Britain, showing how they contribute to maintaining Israeli apartheid.
The focus is on the way the Zionist movement has been forced to mobilise, in the last twelve or fifteen years, in response to a resurgent Palestine solidarity movement, particularly BDS.
Aked is keen to portray the Zionist movement not as a monolithic bloc but rather as “a diverse spectrum of actors, often in conflict with one another”, working across a range of arenas – political, social and cultural – and involving both state and private networks.
“This does not render pro-Israel actors ‘foreign agents’,” Aked writes, “… and the book serves as a corrective to misguided ‘foreign influence’ narratives. My concern is with British actors’ complicity in the systematic denial of Palestinian rights, situated in the wider context of British state racism and colonial history.”
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JVL will be reviewing the book in due course.
This article was originally published by Verso Blogs on Wed 19 Apr 2023. Read the original here.
Cruising for a bruising? Critiquing the British Zionist movement (while trans)
An essay from Hil Aked, author of Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity.
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I am halfway through this book and find it very informative.
However, I draw your attention to this paragraph: “This does not render pro-Israel actors ‘foreign agents’, however, and the book serves as a corrective to misguided ‘foreign influence’ narratives. My concern is with British actors’ complicity in the systematic denial of Palestinian rights, situated in the wider context of British state racism and colonial history”.
I thoroughly agree with Hill Aked’s concern about British actors’ complicity in the denial of Palestinian rights, for which reason I think our prime strategy should involve calling out this behaviour. However, Aked’s statement about ‘foreign agents’ comes over as politically correct but not necessarily true. In the course of history, all sorts of people act as agents for foreign powers, and there is no reason to deny that some people do this for Israel. To give one glaring example, during the Cold War, Western European communist parties (except in Italy, when the party adopted ‘Eurocommunism) owed prime allegiance to Moscow. The French socialist politician Guy Mollet put it like this: “le Parti communiste n’était plus à gauche, « il était à l’est ». Under such circumstances, party faithful could and often did act unconditionally on behalf of the Soviet Union. Why make an exception for Israel supporters?
I’d only add the following to Jonathan’s comment about foreign lobbies. Three countries bucked the post-war decolonisation consensus – Rhodesia, South Africa, and Israel. All of them had lobbies.
Rhodesia mobilised British comedians Jimmy Edwards, Eric Sykes – who put it about that Rhodesia’s white farmers were made up of Battle of Britain pilots.
South Africa’s lobby successfully got Zola Budd into the UK Olympic team – after competing she returned to South Africa.
So colonial lobbies are not new. No reason to shy away from citing Israel’s.
Though years ago even the BBC would label indigenous resistance ‘independence movements’.
I am also concerned about the denial of ‘foreign actors’ part of this narrative. And also the suggestion that the lobby’s members are perhaps bumbling around occasionally getting in each other’s way.
As someone who has catalogued the post-2014 Gaza bombing pro-Israel moral panic, I can say the obvious level of co-ordination contradicts these assertions.
Clearly you have actors, all being fed the same soundbites to use at the same time, the same strategies such as the ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ and stealing aspects of the Black experience. They are also being co-ordinated to work together.
Even beyond what Al Jazeera’s ‘The Lobby’ demonstrated, after the Gaza bombing in a co-ordinated effort, The Jewish Chronicle claimed Scottish Jews were leaving for Israel because of anti-Semitism. Lawyer Mark Lewis and wife told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire they were doing the same. Maureen Lipman claimed she was off to New York – this while ignoring Eric Gardner’s recent killing there – and immediately after this spin had done the rounds, took a gig on UK’s Coronation Street soap opera. Mark Lewis went on to be John Ware’s lawyer.
These recent histories might interest readers.
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hijacking-victimhood-and-demonizing-dissent/
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https://www.palestinechronicle.com/re-marketing-racist-zionism-and-manufacturing-double-white-privilege-plus/