Thoughts from a Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporter

One interest Palestinians, Israelis and Jews share (whether or not they realise it) is to ensure that the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign remain marginal in the movement to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

This is the kind of support it attracts:

“anyone who is not boycotting Israel (both economically and culturally) is supporting Ethnic Cleansing!”

After that comes a call for American tourists to boycott Scotland, pledges to boycott the United States on grounds of its support of Israel, and the wild opinion “I would NOT describe the U.S.A as a democracy”.

The claim that Israel is conducting ethnic cleansing is false, and it’s also false and vindictive to assert that opposition to the total isolation of Israel is tantamount to support of ethnic cleansing. This person is clearly disaffected to the extreme. From what I know of the SPSC, he or she fits in well there.

More SPSC:

• Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign remembers the Holocaust by blaming Zionists
• The SPSC and the Holocaust
• What is going on in the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign?
• What is it with the Scottish PSC?
• Scottish PSC and the Jerusalem Quartet
• Scottish PSC crows as Israelis are not boycotted but chased from Turkish basketball court
• What doesn’t motivate the SPSC
• Open antisemitism is challenging ‘antiracist’ anti-Zionism in the Palestine solidarity movement
• SPSC host Gilad Atzmon

It’s hard to know how to respond to people with these kinds of convictions and zest for conflict.

Cross-posted on Greens Engage.

This year’s Al Quds Day rally

Al Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Although Israeli attitudes to the settlements have hardened recently, many accept that East Jerusalem will one day become the capital of a Palestinian state. This idea, formerly taboo, has been mooted at the highest levels of Israeli politics, and will revive again. There is a corresponding idea of a shared Jerusalem among Palestinians.

In contrast, shortly after the Iranian revolution of 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini established an annual so-called Al Quds Day on the last Friday of Ramadan, with an associated rally which is still pulling crowds today. At Al Quds Day there is no perceptible difference between professed solidarity with Palestinians and visceral hostility to the existence of the state of Israel. Al Quds rallies are held round the world, each with a convenient hook. In Massachussetts Washington D.C., for example, they’ve contrived to fuse opposition to Israel with an anti-corporate message.

This year’s rally is on September 13th. Hopefully it’s clear that it has nothing to do with peace in the Middle East and nothing to do with human rights. Since its new facelift, you can’t search the site of one of its official supporters, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, by country and discover to your astonishment that Israel’s human rights abuses outnumber Iran’s several-fold – but the front page shows its priorities and these do not include the ongoing Iranian show trials.

You won’t hear calls for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, nor for an end to the occupation, nor the dismantlement of the settlements, nor equitable coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians. The reason for this, in the words of one of its official supporters, is that “Israel is the enemy of mankind”. So you’ll encounter intense vicarious nationalism on behalf of Muslim Palestinians coupled with even more intense denial of Jewish nationalism (i.e. Zionism), and you’ll probably read or hear the eliminationist message “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as well as the Holocaust-denying “Zionist Nazis are the same / Only difference is the name” and scapegoating “End of Zionism = End of World Terrorism”. The Hesbollah flag will be flown, photographs of Khomeini dandled. Stop the War (No! Not that one!) Coalition officially support this event.

At Harry’s Place, Habibi introduces one of the main attractions and his associates. Given the tendency of Al Quds Day speakers to return year on year, it seems likely that this the same man who in 2003 addressed the assembly of avowed anti-Zionists with the falsehood:

“If you see terrorism today in the world (as you define it), if you see hatred going on everywhere in the world, it is because of the state of Israel.”

Hopefully it will rain on them again.

Read Peter Tatchell.

If you see terrorism today in the world (as you define it), if you see hatred going on everywhere in the world, it is because of the state of Israel.

Live dangerous – shop at Marks and Spencers. A poem by Steve Cohen.

In comments to an earlier post, Richard Gold drew attention to this poem by independent socialist Steve Cohen.

He wrote it after finding out that the weekly picket of the “Zionist” Marks and Spencer in Manchester had begun to carry pro-Hesballah placards.

Live dangerous – shop at Marks and Spencers

I don’t want to be a court jew
A court jew kneeling before the throne of the idiot anti-zionist
The court jew in the palace of the stupid anti-imperialist
Martin Buber where are you now
You who refused to kneel before the ultimate socialism of fools – anti-semitism.
You who abstained from being the house nigger
From being an Uncle Tevye

I don’t want to shout out “not in my name”
(and my name is Y’Israel Zev ben David)
Instead I want to scream out “Jews don’t need to disassociate themselves from collective guilt cos there is no collective guilt”

I wanna be a dangerous Jew, a frightening Jew, a threatening Jew, a communist Jew, a revolutionary Jew
I don’t wanna be an easy protest Jew
And today the easy protest is to demand the blood-stained might of Israel , gets out of Lebanon, gets out of Gaza, turns back on the road to Damascus, ceases its recreation of armeggedon
You don’t have to be a socialist to demand this, you don’t have to be a Trotskyist to demand this
You don’t have to be a Cohen or a Levy or a Gluckstein to demand this
Or a Y’Israel zev ben David to demand this
You just have to be sane
And in the name of sanity demand it!

Being a dangerous Jew, a frightening Jew, a threatening Jew, a communist Jew, a revolutionary Jew means living on a different planet
The planet of Truth
As Trotsky said “Only the truth is revolutionary”
And the truth is that Hizbollah are not the Sandanistas, are not the ANC, are not the IRA, are not Gueverrists, are not anti-colonialists, are not Spanish Republicans, Sparticists or Bolsheviks
Are not a fitting emblem for our tee shirts

The truth is that they are fascists, neo-fascists , proto fascists
They are feudalists, medievalists,obscurantists
Theocratic collectivists
Seeking to re-establish the Caliphate
A thousand years too late
Without the science, the medicine, the mathamatics, the poetry, the philosophy
Just the Protocols of Zion

Concealing these simple truths
Is not part of any honest anti-war movement
It is part of a dishonest anti-war movement
It is part of a pro-war movement
It is the 1930s. And it is the 1940s.
It is the same movement which saw the red flags of the Israeli Communist Party unfurled in solidarity with Haj Amin al-Husseini
The Mufti of Jerusalem
Idiot anti Zionist
Idiot collaborator with Adolf Hitler

I wanna stand between the anti-zionist picket of Marks and Spencers
And the Zionist picket of the anti-zionist picket of Marks and Spencers
Denouncing the massacres
Wearing the mascara
Being camp
The third camp
Asking do you want to buy a picket or two.

Asking do you enjoy kids’ games.
So let’s play Spot The Difference
A Palestinian child in a two foot coffin
An Israeli child in a two foot coffin
Lids closed
Where do you put your Stop The War flags?
Your Hizbullah flags?
Your Zionist flags?
Your red flags?
Let me tell your where to put them.

I hate this poem
Rather I hate writing this poem
Rather I hate the truths behind this poem
Where sticking simply to the easy protest
Would be an easier way to win friends
But not to influence people

Because the enemy of your enemy can also be another of your enemies
And the friend of your friend can be a bastard reactionary
So don’t dance with the boy who danced with the girl who danced with the prince of darkness
It’s just an accident of geography and sperm direction that Jews weren’t born Muslims
And vice versa
It can get worser
So fight for workers unity
Cut out the communalists
The Board of Deputies and the Muslim Association
So fight for workers unity
Cut out the opiates
The synagogues and the mosques
So fight for workers unity
Sling out the middlemen
The Jihadists and the Israeli leadership
So fight for workers unity

Get a new tee shirt
In my name

CST Antisemitic Discourse Report 2008

Dave Rich from the CST writes :

CST has long been known for recording and analysing antisemitic hate crimes: the physical assaults, desecrations, racist abuse and hate mail that make up a quantifiable measure of antisemitism. But just as, in recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that antisemitism is not restricted to the activities of street thugs and bar room racists, so it has become necessary to chart that other sort of antisemitism: the ideas, images and language that occasionally pollutes public discourse.

Read the whole piece Here.

Download the full report Here.

Naomi Klein and the “get-away-with- genocide free card” and the boycott of Israel

Naomi Klein :

“[Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free-card.”

“the decision isn’t to boycott Israel but rather to oppose official relationships with Israeli institutions.”

ON the UN Durban Review Conference held in Geneva in April, Klein says that she was disturbed by “the Jewish students’ lack of respect for the representatives from Africa and Asia who came to speak about issues like compensation for slavery and the rise of racism around the world.”

Klein described the Jewish students who protested against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at the conference as “truly awful” – in the same breath as she described Ahmadinejad as “truly awful.”

Read Noam Schimmel’s reply Here.

David Hirsh on why Naomi Klein is wrong to call for a boycott of Israel.

Understanding and Addressing ‘The Nazi card’

The European Institute For The Study Of Contemporary Antisemitism has a new report out Understanding and Addressing ‘The Nazi card’.

Read Winston Picket Let’s use the law to halt these Nazi slurs in the Jewish Chronicle.

The Warped Mirror: The ‘Israeli Apartheid’ gospel

Petra Marquardt-Bigman reviews Ben White’s new book “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide”.

Advertised as “The new book by Ben White” on a website dedicated to marketing “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide,” everything seems skillfully designed to appeal both to dedicated Israel-bashers and newcomers eager to learn the basics. Those who have never heard of Ben White, a young Cambridge graduate with a BA in English Literature, will certainly be impressed by the long list of prominent people he could get to endorse his first book that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything he studied: Ben White’s efforts to spread the idea that Israel should be denounced and opposed as an “apartheid state” are warmly praised by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the historian Ilan Pappe, and a number of well-known academics and writers as well as political and religious personalities.

Reviews that are critical of Ben White’s book are, understandably, not featured on this website. One of the most recent reviews that includes links to some noteworthy previous responses to Ben White is available at Z Word. Among the issues that have been repeatedly raised by critics of White’s work are questions about his expertise and his apparent unwillingness to acknowledge that the sources he relies on are anything but uncontroversial and have been shown to contain numerous distortions and misrepresentations.

Read the whole article Here.

Ben White’s questionable book

This is a guest post by Modernity , who blogs at Modernity Blog

Ben White should be known to Engage readers, in the past he often commented and debated issues here.

White’s column at Comment is Free is fairly popular and an outlet for his journalistic endeavours.

More recently White has published a book on Israel, a novice’s guide, entitled “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide”.

Not unsurprisingly with such a provocative title White’s book has aroused much interest and criticism.

A sample of the book can be found here.

It even has its own Facebook page, White updates readers from his blog and main site.

Jews for Justice for Palestinians and War on Want are both advocates for the book.

Criticism of White’s book is varied, but of interest to academics is White’s use of doctored quotes and the inclusion of Roger Garaudy, the well-known Holocaust denier, as an apparently authoritative source on Israel and Zionism.

Discussions on White’s book and how it was promoted can be found at Zblog in several threads.

Seismic Shock has also detailed criticism of White’s handling of material and other matters.

Additionally, my own blog includes a few short pieces, not forgetting Liberal Conspiracy and Mondoweiss.

White’s response to the initial review by Jonathan Hoffman is here.

Eric Lee’s An East London horror story.

Shuggy on Understanding anti-Semitism and Ben White.

Hal Draper: How to Defend Israel – a Program for Israeli Socialists (1948)

Cross-posted on Greens Engage:

Hal Draper and his political party, the Workers’ Party, rejected the idea of partition and believed the ultimate decision to set up a new nation state of Israel in 1948 was a regrettable one. But, recognising that most socialists had not pursued an argument against nationalism in general and should not do so with Jews in 1948, and cognisant of the nature of the enemies of Israel at that time, he authored How To Defend Israel: a Political Program for Israeli Socialists.

This was a time, note, when religion was eclipsed as an influence in Middle East conflicts by a raft of other warring ideologies, and so does not receive the emphasis he would probably give it if he were writing today. The idea of Britain being part of the Big Three is also quaint. And the notion of ‘imperialism’ is, as ever, left unpacked (in my previous post Moishe Postone examines how anti-capitalism became internationalised as anti-imperialism). It was also a time when Palestinians who had suddenly found themselves as Israel’s Arab citizens were living under military rule; since that time a great deal of progress has been made (notwithstanding the present Israeli government – as Mohammad Darawshe remarks “There have been worse”). However, Hal Draper’s thinking about Israel is worth revisiting because of his distinction between elites (which he terms ‘Zionist leadership’ and ‘Arab lords’ or ‘effendis’) and the interests of two peoples, and his acknowledgement of their right to self determination.

“… socialist thinking on this subject must start by understanding the distinction between (a) the Jews’ right to self-determination, and (b) the correctness or advisability of exercising this right to the point of separation under given conditions. We need only refer to the fact that, before and after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ program called for defense of Finland’s right to self-determination: before the revolution, Marxists in Finland advocated separation; after the revolution, the Communists in Finland advocated unity with Russia; but both before and after, there was no question in their minds but that the Finns had the right to separate if they so willed. Never under Lenin did the Soviets attempt to deprive them of that right by force of arms.

But in the present case we do not even have the complication of a workers’ state being involved. Far from it! The attack upon the Jews’ right to self-determination comes from a deeply reactionary social class – the Arab lords – whose reactionary aims in this case are not alleviated by the fact that they themselves suffer from the exploitation of British imperialism (at the same time that they cling to that imperialism in order to defend their privileges against their own people).

In this conflict, as socialists – that is, as the only thoroughgoing and consistent democrats, we not only support the Palestine Jews’ right to self-determination but draw the necessary conclusions from that position: for full recognition of the Jewish state by our own government; for lifting the embargo on arms to Israel; for defense of the Jewish state against the Arab invasion in the present circumstances.

But for us this is not the end of the question but only the beginning.

…

The question which we have asked, following Lenin’s method, was: What politics does this war flow from? War – so goes the platitude – is the continuation of politics by other, forceful, means. In the case of every concrete war, we try to analyze concretely the politics of which that war is the continuation. The Spanish loyalist government was an imperialist government; it exploited Morocco and oppressed the peasants (and shot them down when they revolted!). But when the Franco fascists sought to overthrow even this miserable government, we called for its defense – in our own way, by revolutionary means, and without giving the slightest political support to the bourgeois People’s Front leaders – because our analysis of the concreteness of events showed that the anti-Franco war did not flow from the loyalist government’s imperialist character but from the fascists’ attack upon its democratic base.

This was ABC once.”

Read on.

(I also got a lot out of Hal Draper’s his ABC of National Liberation Movements. I have yet to read his much-cited Two Souls of Socialism. See also Sean Matgamna, whose organisation Workers’ Liberty frequently draws on Draper’s thinking, and who cautions “Draper, I think, did contribute more than a little to the Zionophobe conquest of so much of the left”.)

Via Contested Terrain.

Eve Garrard: What is to be done about antisemitism?

This is how Eve concludes.  The rest too is, as always, indispensable reading:

…Jews, like everyone else, have multiple identities, criss-crossing and overlapping in a variety of ways. With respect to her identity as a Jew, a British Jew might in the first instance feel fear and dread at the spectacle of resurgent anti-Semitism on the left (or anywhere else). But with respect to her identity as a Briton, she might feel appalled, furious, outraged at what is being done to the liberal culture which she (rightly) loves and admires and feels proud of. When the British left is ready to compare Israel to the Nazis, declare Gaza to be similar to the Warsaw Ghetto, and treat genocidal threats against Jews as a trivial matter; when the Guardian, the principal media organ of this sector of society, opens its columns to a constant stream of such venom; when members of the intelligentsia are ready with breezy nonchalance to dismiss Jewish concerns about anti-Semitism as overheated overstatement, and Jewish self-defence as sinister brutality; then a terrible degradation of thought and sentiment has taken place here in the UK, among an influential part of the chattering classes. For the sake of liberal culture in Britain, as well as for the sake of its Jewish citizens, we all have reason to fight resurgent anti-Semitism, and to support a renewed commitment to the universal values which protect us, irrespective of our race or gender or religion, and which make the inhabitants of this country, in global and historical terms, a very fortunate group of people.

Read the whole piece by Eve Garrard on normblog.