Is it possible to be pro Israel AND pro Palestine?
JVL Introduction
Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian author, doctor, academic and, until expelled by Starmer’s Labour Party, an active member of the Party. Her family fled Jerusalem in 1948 and have been unable to return. She has been a powerful advocate for Palestinian rights and Jewish Voice for Labour is proud to work with her. Her latest book is One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, a conclusion more and more people are being drawn to (see, eg here , here and in this Opinion piece from Mustafa Barghouti.
Ghada Karmi writes in the wake of the cancellation of her talk with Lowkey about her new book and, of course, she writes from her own family’s history and within the framework of 75 years of dispossession and oppression for Palestinian people. She raises criticisms of Yachad among many other important points. Yachad, unlike JVL, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and other pro Palestinian rights organisations in the UK and throughout the world, is less likely to be ignored by the mainstream Jewish community and, eg is able even to get a former Board of Deputies President to write this piece for Jewish News headed: Equality before the law in the West Bank is shockingly absent . But Yachad also believes Lowkey needs to be investigated. The Electronic Intifada published this piece in response to the decision by the Balfour Project to cancel the book launch and Yachad have responded to that statement
Here is what Dr. Karmi has written about what happened and that she sees support for Israel is incompatible with support for Palestinians. This is too often interpreted as antisemitism, but it is part of the growing call for a state of all its citizens between the river and the sea.
Dr. Karmi was offered another time to speak but without Lowkey, something she refused to do. JVL believes that Palestinian voices must be heard and that open and respectful debate on the ideas in her book and much more is essential if we are to move forward.
You can buy the book online direct from the publisher Pluto Press
This article was originally published by Novara Media on Thu 25 May 2023. Read the original here.
You’re Either Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestine. You Can’t Be Both
Zionism is incompatible with Palestinian freedom, full stop.
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I agree with what Dr Karmi writes, but we should also remember that human rights attach to individuals and not to states (such as ‘Israel’ or ‘USA’ or ‘Syria’), which have no human rights. It is possible, and indeed necessary, to defend human rights even for individual Zionist oppressors, while insisting that their ideology, and the state and other organisations created in its image, must be completely transformed, so that all can enjoy the fundamental rights in the UDHR (from which, for example, the ‘right of return’ is taken, again talking about an individual who leaves their country, not a nation, which is a social construct, like a state).
‘Liberal Zionist’ isn’t that a non sequitur?
The problem is that many Jews and others who count themselves as Zionists, don’t actually understand or don’t want to understand the meaning and implications of Zionism. How can any person possibly agree with one of Zionism’s tenets, that thousands of years ago, a god of some description promised a certain area of land to a particular sect of people whose decendants have the right to return there to the exclusion of all others. Avigail Abarbanel summed up Zionism well, when she said ‘it is a mental illness, a delusional belief that you have rights which do not exist’.
It would appear that there are quite a few members of the Labour Party, including some MPs, who are afflicted with this mental illness!!!
The land is already-settled. Ethnic-cleansing, colonial-Zionist terrorists are increasingly backed by the army in an accelerated programme of Palestinian dispossession and you call them “settlers”?
I was doing some research yesterday about the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, as such, ended up reading the WHOLE of Blair’s WMD speech on March 18, in which he said the following:
Right, so that’s TWENTY years now. Needless to say it was pure B/S! And although he didn’t go so far as to directly accuse Saddam Hussain of being behind 9/11 – as Bush and his neocons as good as did repeatedly – Blair brings it up again and again in his speech.