Total Solidarity With Palestine is the Only Anti-Racist Position
JVL Introduction
Barnaby Raine, writing on Novara Media, doesn’t duck the awkward question – Palestinians have a moral right to self-defence.
“Racism” Raine points out, ” ensures that… Palestinians are expected to coexist constantly with people who lecture them about the ‘right to exist’ of the state built atop their burned homes. And Palestinians are usually expected to shut up about it, to show endless patience for the traumas of the people who murder them…”
To cap it all, “The dispossessed are, if they fight back, blamed for their own dispossession. They are chided, like children, for losing their temper with an abusive parent who should be allowed to beat up the child in peace.”
Enough already!
This article was originally published by Novara Media on Thu 13 May 2021. Read the original here.
Total Solidarity With Palestine is the Only Anti-Racist Position
Palestinians have a moral right to self-defence
Loading article text…
This is no local problem. This is precedent for the 21st Century. There are groups everywhere vulnerable to dispossession. We must take a stand now on behalf of the Palestinians, on behalf of people everywhere. Netanyahu is overplaying his hand. He must be made to pay the price for this. But how? But if not now, when?
Staggering.
Here ! Here! Barnaby.
From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free!
Free! Free! Palestine!
Good analogy. I have used Christianity. If Britain was now called Christendom, and all Christians can come here automatically, and all non Christians must leave, how would that go down ? The 2 state solution is dead. The only way out is a secular multicultural state. That’s is going to take a very long time. RIP all the victims of this Aparteid state.
A very silly analogy Barnaby to the situation and to the 3,000+ year history of Jews in Israel. I’ve commented before that there is plenty to criticise about Israel without making stuff up about apartheid etc, and rewriting history and news but JVL, which claims in its “mission statement” to care about Jews everywhere but has never published a word in sympathy for Jewish dead, doesn’t encourage comments that challenge its narrative. Well 99.9% of Jews do care about other Jews and we also care about lives lost in Gaza.
And ” .. from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” ..
I wonder what that is code for, certainly not for peace.
Have you noticed how the MSM has paid little attention to the demonstrations in support of the palestinians over the weekend? We need to up the anti to make them take our demands for Palestinian justice seriously. They seem to be more interested in reporting on the instances of antisemitic abuse triggered by the violence of Jewish supremacists and the agents of the Israeli state repressive apparatus.
A true insight that leaves one gasping, and why don’t peoples from all around the world want to be rid of the shackles of racism, it is in the interests of the many, the many so used to their chains, the end of racism is inevitable but I am impatient, I am at the latter period of my life, is it too much to ask that I see the end of racism?
Barnaby’s best phrase: “trauma is not a university”.
May I ask Jaye to tell us what part of history has the writer has rewritten? The truth is no matter where the dispossession had taken place the same violent reaction would have occurred. You may indeed care about lives lost in Gaza so why keep on murdering them.? I have spent much time studying the history of the conflict. The killing started within days of the creation of the State of Israel . Deir Yassin comes to mind. The people who were gifted somebody else’s land cared not a jot about the dispossessed who were deemed disposable. Non humans. As for the charge of apartheid the UN have named it so. Amnesty International and the British TUC have said the same. I believe this is a George Floyd moment. Ordinary people throughout the world have woken up to Israeli crimes and are demonstrating al over the world. The Far Right will use this as proof of the power of the Jewish lobby. What happened to the Labour Party will be used for the same purpose. I have no doubt that antisemitism will increase . The Israeli PM and the hard right settlers are to blame . I write this with great sorrow as I have spent a lifetime opposing all forms of racism.
Whilst we are in the realm of analogy, every now and then I fear that one day it will occur to right-wingers (and maybe even not so right-wingers) to say to the Diaspora Jews in whichever country we live: “Well, you have a Jewish state now. A state whose politicians make it clear that it is both the national home and the national representative for all Jews. You are taking up space and housing and jobs and wealth in our country. Be gone to your Jewish state!”
Most Jews in Britain can only trace our British ancestry back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century/start of the twentieth. Many arrived just pre-war (1939-45) and others were Holocaust survivors. We don’t even have the historic and moral connections bestowed by Empire. If my nightmare scenario above were ever to come to pass, how would we show we have a better ‘right’ to be here than all the Palestinians (and their descendants) who were dispossessed from pre-48 Mandate Palestine and have no hereditary rights?
(And yes, I know this kind of construct is used by Zionists to justify the State of Israel – Jews need it if we ever have to flee! But my point is different: it’s about logic and equivalence. Whether or not we ‘need’ or want a Jewish homeland, well now we have it, handed to us on a plate. Yet most of us have no desire to live there, though many diaspora Jews take our ‘right’ to visit Israeli for granted, provided it is followed by coming ‘home’ to Britain, the US, France, Holland, Canada etc. What depths of assumed race-privilege make our ‘rights’ and preferences and expectations sacrosanct, while Palestinians are expected to put up and shut up?)
In this “conflict” of unequals who is being terrorised? Who is facing an”existential threat”? We know it is the Palestinians across their ancestral homeland. A few Hamas rockets piercing through Israel’s Iron Dome defence system hardly constitutes an existential threat to the state of Israel.
.