Nakba denial is at the heart of pro-Israel lobbying
JVL Introduction
Recognition or denial of the Nakba is a great faultline in US politics, as Mitchell Plitnik argues forcefully in this article in Mondoweiss.
In response to the US calling the UN’s Nakba Day recognition a reflection of “anti-Israel bias,” Plitnik asks: “Would the US call recognition of the horrors of slavery anti-American? Would it call a Holocaust commemoration anti-German? There is no difference.”
And he argues that anti-Arab/Palestinian racism and Islamophobia are significant factors in forming US foreign policy. They reinforce the stereotypes of the “Muslim other”, downgrading the participation of Palestinians and their supporters in public debates about foreign relations and human rights.
How else can you explain why the US fails to use its leverage to press for Palestinian security, for Israel to grant Palestinians their rights, whether in a single democratic state or a separate Palestinian one?
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Sun 21 May 2023. Read the original here.
Nakba denial is at the heart of pro-Israel lobbying
Just as the Nakba is at the heart of Palestinian national existence, the denial of the Nakba is at the heart of the racist ideology that has so successfully warped U.S. foreign policy.
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This is interesting and contains helpful information and some apt comment. However, the reality is much more fundamental. The USA is a settler-colonial state built on genocide and dispossession. That is what Israel and the USA have in common. Thus the Palestinians are just the latest to suffer at the hands of US foreign policy: notably the Vietnamese: any number of peoples elsewhere in the Americas: peoples in Africa, Asia and Arabia.
As a British citizen I am as appalled by the US policies as I am by those of my own ruling class.