Ending progressives’ Palestinian exception
JVL Introduction
Sarah Doyel writes: “For all their legitimate criticisms of other injustices, progressives, with a few exceptions, continued their tradition of deafening silence on those suffered by the Palestinian people.”
It is this irony, captured by the acronym PEP – Progressive except for Palestine – that provides the title for a book under review here.
In it, authors Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick devote themselves to deconstructing the arguments progressives offer for making an exception of Palestine when it comes to demands for equal rights.
Doyel lays out the authors’ arguments about the major debates in progressive politics in this area beginning with the central existential question of Israel’s “right to exist.”
They continue on to discuss the bipartisan criminalisation of the BDS movement and more; and challenge the progressive view that the Trump administration’s policy toward Israel-Palestine was an aberration.
On the contrary, they argue that despite its damaging effect, it was merely taking existing contentions to their logical conclusion.
Doyel also hints at limitations to the authors’ analysis, for instance not developing the argument of how the “liberal” justificatory basis for Israel’s violence against Palestinians lets off the hook those for whom the mere presence of Palestinians is regarded as an existential threat.
Read on!
This article was originally published by Mondoweis on Thu 11 Feb 2021. Read the original here.
Ending progressives’ Palestinian exception
Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick’s “Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics” is a crucial and ultimately hopeful tool that better equips progressives to combat injustices within their own political circles.
Loading article text…
“Their argument is not that progressives should privilege Palestinian rights over those of Israelis”
Is Ethnic Cleansing and white settler colonialism ever morally justified ?
No ?
Well then surely one would want to “privilege” the rights of the colonised over the colonisers ?
To do otherwise treats the victimizer and victim with equal respect. Surely that can never be morally justified ?
It seems to me that the Democrats are, fundamentally, spineless in this matter. The US democratic system depends on vast spending at election time and the Democrats are dependent on business, which means AIPAC. AIPAC, in turn, has been brainwashed by the formidable propaganda machine under the control of the government of Israel.
Furthermore, the lessons of religion have been woefully lost. Biden as a Catholic cannot decently give unconditional support to Israel. Others, better qualified than me, can spell out the obligations under the Jewish religion.
At the beginning, Obama was different, with crowd-funding support, a route taken by Bernie Sanders. In practice, this is hard to sustain. People may despair, but the threats, and actual onset, of climate change disaster may bring change because people will need to cooperate much more. It will still be difficult to shift establishments from their positions.
The public domain may come into fashion once more, but power in society is not fairly distributed. We know about this in Britain and one can only hope that the lesson of the handling of the pandemic will not be lost. No doubt, the word “apartheid” will also have some effect for change as people learn respect for others is all important.