Divided we fall: How the US left cannot agree on Palestine
JVL Introduction
Rod Such, a new left activist in the sixties and seventies, reviews Michael R. Fischbach’s recent book The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left.
Much of the New Left sided with Israel in the 1967 war, but its commitment to global revolution and opposition to imperialism placed growing strains on support for “Israeli exceptionalism”.
The debates of that period are highly relevant today as the battles between JStreet and Jewish Voice for Peace testify and and as supporters of the Palestinian struggle try to take that commitment into the heart of the Democratic Party.
This article was originally published by Electronic Intifada on Wed 1 Apr 2020. Read the original here.
Divided we fall: How the US left cannot agree on Palestine
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How odd to ‘portray Israel as a settler-colonial state that had ethnically cleansed Palestinians in 1948’! That is not a ‘portrayal’ – it is the literal and precise truth, as witnessed by Ben Gurion, Dayan and plenty of the less coy and artful Israeli leaders. Nakba denial is politically, morally and historically on a par with holocaust denial – except that the nakba is ongoing.
Yet in the LP guidance document No Place for Antisemitism, the nakba is erased from the brief history of Israel – and the three candidates for leadership had the impudent mendacity to denounce as antisemitic the clinically accurate statement that the foundation of Israel was a racist endeavour. (“No room for Palestinians”). Under great pressure, of course from – but pressure that the leadership never resisted. Nonetheless, a shameful support for the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and other occupied areas.
It seems that uprooting support for the Palestinians’ rights, life and land from the LP will continue at an even faster pace, to the great joy of Netanyahu, Lieberman, Bennett and their more extreme and explicitly genocidal allies.
So we must redouble our efforts to repel this onslaught.