For a future that works for Palestinians and Israelis, fears cannot be ignored
JVL Introduction
Many of us on the Left outside Israel have probably not given enough credibility to the fears that were stirred up for Jewish Israelis by the October 7th Hamas attack, not least given the decades of terror under which Palestinians have tried to live for many decades in Gaza and the West Bank. We have, rightly, been focused on trying to end the genocide in Gaza but we also need to think about the future. Haggai Mattar, long a campaigner for justice for Palestinians argues that if the Left fails to respond to those fears, we concede the space to the Right that, especially in Israel, nurtures that fear and barely submerged intergenerational trauma, built on centuries of persecution to “justify what we do to Palestinians, preserving it at the center of how we see ourselves and the world around us.” (My emph Ed)
For those of us watching the horrors unfold in Gaza over the past fourteen months, Israeli fears are easy to dismiss this but this article gives a different perspective especially when thinking about creating a future society where Palestinians and Jewish Israelis can build a future where everyone has the chance to live with dignity, security and with justice in peace. Isn’t this what we, as socialists want? Given neither Palestinians not Israelis are going anywhere, we have to find ways to address rather than dismiss that intergenerational trauma – and, of course that must also be true for Palestinians as well as Israeli and Diaspora Jews.
In the UK we do understand the context for October 7th but perhaps have not understood well enough how terrible the attacks were and not fully appreciated the profound fears that have been (re) awakened even among those in Israel who have been actively working for justice and peace and equality for Palestinians from the river to the sea.
Voices such as Mattai’s are missing from the mainstream media which may focus on Israeli fears but not, as he does, on the deep injustices and the death and destruction that has been so much of the Palestinian experience – before as well as since October 7th – by Israel. It is also, too often, a perspective largely ignored by the Left (including us) .
LL
This article was originally published by +972 Magazine on Tue 26 Nov 2024. Read the original here.
Grappling with Jewish fears in a just Palestinian struggle
Recognising Zionism’s settler-colonial nature shouldn’t prevent us from reimagining a collective Jewish existence in this land, or taking seriously the fears that are weaponized to justify Palestinian subjugation.
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I do not see how you can push for BDS against Israel while at the same time promoting the anti-Palestinian October 7 mass rape propaganda of the Netanyahu government.
The UN Human Rights Council June 10 report exonerated Hamas of any rape, genital mutilation or sexual torture, declaring that there was no verifiable evidence of any such act occurring on October 7, 2023 (paragraphs 138, 139). As for less severe acts of sexual abuse occurring on October 7, 2023, the report found no verifiable evidence linking such acts to any Palestinian (paragraph 291).
Those of us in the Palestinian solidarity movement are puzzled by the actions of 972 after October 7. One of its publishers, Lisa Goldberg, tweeted that she saw photos of headless Jewish babies from October 7 just like US President Joe Biden did; both claims were easily debunked lies.
This:
.”.. recognition that Israeli Jews do constitute a distinct people, with no less of a right to self-determination as any other nation in the world — so long as that right does not come at the expense of the same right of Palestinians.”
is a logical oxymoron.
The only way is a secular state of all peoples – it is impossible to have a ‘Jewish nation state’ that doesn’t exclude other people.
Haggai Matar and nearly all the Israeli left cannot think outside the framework of the society they were born in.
Haggai treads a well ploughed field. I addressed this question back in March in an article Israel’s Holocaust trauma is a myth
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-holocaust-trauma-myth/45376
I don’t doubt the good intentions of Haggai and his comrades but they represent a fraction of the Israeli Jewish population. Even before October 7 they were a miniscule minority. The messsianic right had seized control of the government, the war in the West Bank was underway, Jenin was under perpetual siege.
The Holocaust has been fashioned, quite deliberately, into an ideological and political weapon whose discourse justifies settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
I have written at length about how Israel, even directly after the holocaust, shunned any mention of the holocaust.
Hanzi Brand wrote of how, when she settled on Kibbutz Gvata Haim, the other members ‘talked about their war to avoid hearing about hers.’ Israelis listened to the survivors’ stories with a ‘forced patience’ that was soon exhausted.’ (Yisrael Gutman)
It was only in the wake of the Eichmann trial, itself the product of the Kasztner trial, that the Holocaust became part of the settler colonial narrative. Before then Masada had been the ideal held up.
Yes October 7th was a traumatic shock. I accept that. So were the slave rebellions in Haiti, Jamaica etc. The Afrikaaners never forgot Bloemfontein and the other British concentration camps when they justified their apartheid.
But does the Iraqi Ben Gvir suffer from intergenerational holocaust trauma? Does the exterminationist mentality of ‘2 Nice Jewish Boys’ owe its origins to Auschwitz? Does the practice of tanks mowing down hundreds if not thousands of Palestinians belong to Treblinka?
The origins of Zionist barbarities, fully on display in Gaza, belong not in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany but in Andrew Jackson’s Native Removal Act of 1830 and the violent reactions to the slave revolts.
It’s time the Israeli left stopped using the holocaust to explain what everyone can see with their own eyes. The racial supremacy of Israelis is not caused by the 6 million but the contempt Zionism has for the holocaust dead.