There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart contrasts the ANC’s strategy in South Africa with Hamas’s, for inspiration as to how ethical resistance works and might succeed.
While Hamas does not speak for the Palestinian people as a while, argues Beinart, even many who loathe the organisation give it tacit support because they have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed.
Why? Because Israel, with America’s active support, has convinced so many that non-violent strategies – appeals to international law, UN Security Council initiatives, the use of BDS – can achieve nothing. They are complicit in what is happening.
Writing particularly but not only for an American audience, Beinart says
“Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support?”
RK
This article was originally published by Portside, via the New York Times on Thu 19 Oct 2023. Read the original here.
There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.
When Palestinians resist oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the U.S. allies work to ensure those efforts fail, which convinces Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work
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‘On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.’
Brilliant piece, and in a sane world it wouldn’t even arise, because we would all be together, which is of course what the vast majority of people on the planet would infinitely prefer. The thing we have to do is to fully understand WHO and WHAT it is that prevents that togetherness and which, as such, created this totally messed up insane reality that we live in.
It is generally a very good piece and goes in to great detail about the nature of the Palestinian struggle and why it has become so intractable. However I would just differ a little on the parallels with South Africa and the methods the ANC used. I think Israel is of far greater strategic importance to the West and therefore the stakes far higher. That is why for example the BDS campaign has been so opposed. Also if you look at South Africa today it would be hard to argue that the post apartheid situation is paradise for the majority of blacks. The post apartheid transition was relatively peaceful but only at the price of maintaining entrenched white privilege.
In terms of the way forward the main hope I have is that the masses in other Arab countries rise up in the way they did during the Arab spring.