Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.
JVL Introduction
This is an important essay by Mohammed El-Kurd, Palestinian poet, writer, journalist, and organiser. He inveighs with passion and anger against the realities of Palestinian oppression and the use of accusations of antisemitism to silence Palestinian voices.
The conflation of Jews with Israelis is overt in Israel-Palestine. It’s a proudly Jewish state with a proudly Jewish army and a proudly Jewish flag. The oppressors of the Palestinians are Jews.
It is an open secret, affirms El-Kurd, but what matters is not what they do to you, but how you speak about them. Make sure to “distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision”.
El-Kurd has had enough of it: on the ground it is a meaningless distinction. A hint of a trope is inherent in any honest description of the situation and a trope trumps the reality of home demolitions, expulsions or pogroms:
“There is a Jew who lives–by force—in half of my home in Jerusalem, and he does so by “divine decree”. Many others reside—by force—in Palestinian houses, while their owners linger in refugee camps. It isn’t my fault that they are Jewish…”
And again:
“There’s no escaping being accused of antisemitism. It’s a losing battle and, more importantly, a glaring red herring… There are better things to do: we have coffins to carry…”
Make sure you read this!
RK
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Tue 26 Sep 2023. Read the original here.
Jewish settlers stole my house. It’s not my fault they’re Jewish.
Palestinians are told the words we use dwarf the decades of violence enacted against us by the self-proclaimed Jewish State. A drone is one thing, but a trope—a trope is unacceptable. No more.
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What a brilliant article! It needs to be required reading for the Labour Leadership and all members of Labour Friends of Israel. (I don’t think there’s any point giving it to the rabid racists of LAA and CAA.) It reflects the anger I’ve been feeling for many years now when accusations of antisemitism are thrown at us whenever we dare to raise what Israel is doing to us. And it made me think that Naqba denial is the same type of crime as Holocaust denial; not the same scale obviously, but the same type of crime.
Thought-provoking essay, which should be widely read. Though overly selective on selective on Mahmoud Abbas’s speech, which reportedly included these words “”They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true,” Abbas said, adding that the Europeans “fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money (…) In his [Adolf Hitler’s] view, they were engaged in sabotage, and this is why he hated them,” . Prioritising the killing of every man, woman and child of a group that you define as a race, wherever they live, is genocide, the ultimate hate crime. It did not matter whether the individuals were involved in finance (a very small proportion) or imagined sabotage. Abbas’ point seems at best highly ignorant.
If an ultra-nationalist Zionist leader advocates the same against Palestinians, we wouldn’t be seeking to justify it by their ‘beliefs’ and say it wasn’t hateful or anti-Palestinian.
On a practical level, clarity of thought in the anti-colonial struggle leadership and reaching out to potential and actual allies in the oppressor group, or their overseas supporters, is often an essential ingredient in success.
It’s a brilliant article – nearly entirely. Saying – ‘I didn’t choose Jews to be my oppressors’ is a huge wake-up call, superbly expressed. At so many points El-Kurd nails the hypocrisy of complaining about alleged Palestinian wrongdoing (especially verbal ‘antisemitism’), while ignoring vicious state-sanctioned/sponsored/supported violence and/or individual violence by Jews against Palestinians. No words can compare with shooting dead an autistic man, or shooting another through the neck so he was paralysed for the rest of his short life, or seizing a Palestinian home, or jailing stone throwing Palestinian kids, or or or. . . .
Yet I don’t agree with him over the letter from Palestinian intellectuals.
We all know that ‘antisemitism’ has been weaponised by the right, by many Zionists, by our Jewish establishment, to prohibit ANY criticism of Israel. We also know that antisemitic ‘tropes’ are discovered daily – I am totally with him on the octopus, and I have to confess to only recently learning about the message that ‘puppet master’ is claimed to convey.
We have also experienced sheer lying accusations of ‘antisemitism’ against anyone who dares to stand up for Palestinian rights in any way whatsoever.
But there was nothing hidden/arguable/unclear in what Abbas said. It shook me instantly when I first saw it. Jews as alleged usurers and as the saboteur within is not a newly invented ‘trope’ – it is crystal clear antisemitism.
Most of all – what good did Abbas’ statement do to the Palestinian cause? Or, what harm?!
As El-Kurd says himself – some of those Palestinian intellectuals have been criticising the PA since before he was born. They also stand up and criticise Israeli oppression – he knows that they are not collaborators nor blind to the cruelty visited on Palestinians for 75 years. They are recognising that bigotry/antisemitism/islamophobia are indivisible in their inhumanity – and are saying so. El-Kurd’s article is brilliant – nearly entirely. I will use it, draw on it, copy it, repeat it – but I am grateful for that Palestinian intellectuals’ letter.
I STILL think El Kurd was wrong to attack the letter from the Palestinian intellectuals, but having this lunchtime heard the disgusting responses from a variety of governments – insisting on Israel’s RIGHT always to ‘defend’ itself – I think they should be force-fed this article. The oppressed – who have only ‘terrorism’ to hand to resist (remembering that throwing stones is also categorised as ‘terror’)- are always held to account for their resistance , while the daily oppression of occupation and discrimination goes unpunished – and uncriticised – all the time.
I hope David Baddiel never reads the James Baldwin essay which inspired this one.