Yes, Palestinians have the right to speak about antisemitism
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
David Myers, a lecturer in Jewish history, is president of the board of the New Israel Fund in the USA.
In this opinion piece in Forward he defends passionately the right of Palestinians to speak out on the subject of antisemitism.
He writes that “it is necessary to perform the same act of empathy that Jews demand of the nations of the world. What does the question look like through the eyes of Palestinians? They have been subjected to the major trauma of the Nakba and have had their self-determination consistently denied…”
This article was originally published by Forward on Fri 4 Dec 2020. Read the original here.
Yes, Palestinians have the right to speak about antisemitism
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I wrote to the Guardian supporting the letter by the Palestinian academics but, needless to say, it wasn’t printed.
It very much reminded me of my own experience when, as a secular Jew, I visited Israel/Palestine for the first time a few years ago, as part of a mixed Jewish/non-Jewish group. I was shocked – in a very positive way – that not one Palestinian said anything antisemitic either to me or in front of me the whole time we were were there.
The comment made over and over again was that “we have nothing against Jews, we lived side by side with them for centuries. The problems only began when the Zionists came.”
I came away with the strong feeling that if they, at the sharp end of the Israeli state and the IDF, could so easily differentiate between Zionism and antisemitism, it really shouldn’t be too difficult in the UK!
There is an issue not addressed in this article which is the problem of the term ‘semitic’ and the addition of ‘anti’ to it. Palestinians speak a semitic language so they are as entitled as Jewish people to object to what is called ‘antisemitism’.
But other oppressed groups and minorities have to accept objecting to racism and racialism; wanting a special term smacks of ‘a hierarchy of the oppressed’, a very reactionary notion.
I’ve just started reading Howard Zinn’s excellent People’s History of the US – chapters dealing with colonialists’ treatment of Native Americans and black slaves. Zinn’s argument is that in the interests of perspective we should approach history from the viewpoint of those peoples who are marginalized, oppressed and exploited by the dominant group. Much of the material is shocking, evidence of the wholesale blindness of people who consider themselves guided by ‘Christian’ values to the Immorality of their treatment of those they think of as their inferiors. It seems that widespread recognition of endemic racism only comes a century later than its worst abuses, at which point it becomes unavoidable. Zionists please take note.