The times they are a’changin…
JVL Introduction
Jonathan Freedland’s new column in the Guardian is once again reflecting a changing mood.
Even though there are reservations – western attitudes to the Middle East may be shifting – there is room for the most cautious of optimisms as we come out of the bloody, one-side carnage of the last ten days.
As Haaretz’s editor Aluf Benn puts it, Israel knows that it has endured a strategic disaster, in this “most failed and pointless border war” in its history.
And Freedland wonders, as do “plenty of credible observers… if a turning point was reached this last fortnight in the way the Israel/Palestine conflict is seen around the world and especially in the west. For a loud and influential segment of opinion, it is being reframed not as a national conflict of competing claims, but as a straightforward matter of racial justice.”
Not before time.
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Fri 21 May 2021. Read the original here.
Israel should take note: the weight of opinion is turning against it
Thanks in part to a global focus more intense than on any other conflict, western attitudes to the Middle East may be shifting.
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You give Freedland and the Guardian far too much credit given their cheerleading against the pro-Palestinian left under the antisemitism smear. They always huff and puff about Israeli excess but it will be business as usual soon.
Freedland also propagates a false narrative about other ‘conflicts’ – they are in fact extensively covered in the left-wing media and in demos but are mainly not generations long settler-colonialism and are also subject to various sanctions, which Israel is not.
It isn’t about a body count – South Africa did not have a big death rate – but about apartheid, which at least Freedland has the grace to mention albeit in quotes from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
yes Jonathan Freedland has finely attuned attenae and Israel has definitely lost the propaganda war this time around. ‘Antisemitism’ is past its sell by date but still it will be flogged for all its worth.
The question is how we ensure that we do press home the political advantages to be gained.
Alas, I don’t think JF has changed his spots. Most of the article is about ‘disproportionate’ focus on Israel, more than hinting that this is due to latent anti-Semitism. He does not take into account Britain’s long-standing responsibility in the region, nor about Israel’s claim to be a Western-style democracy, nor about Israel’s near membership of the EU and our close trading relations, including the arms trade, in both directions. These all put Israel in a different category from China or Myanmar. He just expresses nervousness that more people are becoming involved in supporting Palestinian rights.
Interesting from Freedland. Is he OK with AO-C
calling Israel an apartheid state? He’ll be saying Corbyn was right next
And yet if
Corbyn and Sanders had not been stopped ?
Its not rocket science folks
After reading Friedland’s Guardian article, I thought it intrinsically biased, all the way through, against the oppressed and desperate Palestinians.
When will Jonathan Freedland disown the Israeli settler colonial regime and the system of apartheid established to maintain it? When will he admit that the inherently anti Palestinian definition of antisemitism is nothing but an attempt to shield Israel from legitimate criticism?We all know he supports whatever Israel can get away with. The fact that they may be limits to the level of injustice it is able to inflict on the Palestinians may explain the tone of this article. The idea of a withdrawal from the occupied territories takes us back to the illusion of the two state solution. He has run out of ideas about how to defend an ethnocratic regime in the 21st century against the demands for a unitary secular democratic state. How can a newspaper like the Guardian be wedded to an apartheid state?
We can only hope that the political world turns against Israel but I suspect that the Israeli Lobby is robust enough to fend it off. They have too many politicians under their control, mostly through financial reward.