The image is “Exterminating the cockroach” Yosi Even Kama came up with these posters about the fascist state in 2011 as part of an art project about how things would be in 2023. Search on google images for more.
The past year since Hamas’ attack has been traumatic for the Australian Jewish community locally and internationally. The fate of hostages appears to in the hands of Netanyahu, his generals, and extremists, who despite public outrage, has continued to prosecute an unwinnable war. It is now clear that that Hamas has made numerous offers for a prisoner exchange and ceasefire, but these have been deliberately refused with a preference for war at all costs by the Israeli government. Israeli Jews who protest are now arrested and beaten up. This includes hostage members’ families and protesting members of the Israeli establishment. The forces of anti-democratic extreme nationalism and militarism have taken over the country, unimpeded. Sadly, this mentality appears to be held by some Jews locally.
This war against the Palestinian people has now been extended to the West Bank and into Lebanon against Hezbollah for firing rockets. For liberal Zionists, the sum total of such a military strategy is a betrayal of what they thought was possible, to negotiate a peaceful political settlement for two peoples, in two states. Zionism as an ideal now appears bereft of a moral foundation and liberal Zionists are flailing. For non-Zionists and anti-Zionist Jews, it is confirmation of their worst fears about the seemingly inevitable drift of Zionism to extremism of the worst sort.
Some now call what is going on genocide, others reject the term as offensive, and in fact, it is up to the Internal Court of Justice to make the final ruling. But with the ongoing evidence of incitement to genocide in the Israeli media, we should call a spade a spade. This is a situation where some Israeli Jews are calling for, or taking part in war crimes.
The violence in real time – aided by an almost unimpeded flow of American arms is like nothing we have seen before, and we have rapidly entered into the world of science fiction with remote explosions of pagers and other devices.
There is always the same excuse for such violence and its “collateral” damage – Hamas or Hezbollah are our eternal enemies and the fight is existential. The only solution is military eradication. Sadly, this is the script that has been in use for decades, but it has worn thin. This violence is an attempt to permanently destroy anything that amounts to independent Palestinian life. The Israel State rejects the existence of an independent Palestine. But people’s wars – which is what the revolt in Gaza is about – are not won by military force, as learned in Algeria and Vietnam.
Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, far beyond Hamas’ own act on October 7. Israeli soldiers have been filmed rejoicing in destruction and using Palestinians as human shields. Hospitals and schools and universities have been destroyed and journalists killed. Aljazeerah is closed down. Thousands are arrested for unspecified crimes. Starvation is taking place. This is not an ordinary war for legitimate defence. It is something far, far worse. For Palestinians and their supporters, this is considered to be a continuation of what went on in 1948 and thereafter, but this time, the world sees the brutality on its screens.
This brutality helps to explain why the atrocity against Jews and foreign workers on October 7 is now considered by many on the left as of secondary importance, when it has become an obsession among Jews, used to reinforce the sense of eternal victimhood. It also helps to explain the simplistic identification by some with Hamas’ actions and its war machine as a justified form of resistance “by any means possible”, when the result has been the superior and brutal murder conducted by Israel. It also helps to explain why so many have doubted accounts of sex crimes and atrocities by Hamas, when Israel manipulated unclear information from the very beginning. In war, truth is the first casualty.
Israel/Palestine brings together issues of war and peace, identity, and great power politics as a social media event. It has become a focus for culture and political wars that particularly affect the thinking of alienated young people in a world that appears to be falling apart under the pressure of climate change, political corruption, and technological abuse.
The brutality of Israel’s assault also helps to explain how the uncritical acceptance of formerly specialist academic theories about colonialism, imperialism, and racism, have found root in many corners of the left internationally, angered by the lack of action by the US and others to stop the carnage. Palestine has become the cause celebre even a surrogate for all international injustice even though other brutal regional wars and massacres also call for attention. The difference is of course, that Israel has claimed to be acting as a democracy and in the interests of the West. At times of course, this anger over Israel has at times segued into explicitly conspiratorial antisemitism, though this is abhorrent to responsible pro-Palestine advocates.
In fact, the idea that only the colonized, not the colonialist has any rights is totally ahistorical. Theories should not be set in stone and exclude other insights. In this case, the current take on Israel as a colony reflects theoretical narrowness and the absence of deep knowledge or particular empathy for the peculiar and awful historical circumstances that brought about migration of so many Jews to historical Palestine, as Zionists of one sort or other, or desperate refugees. Once a colony, damned as a colony for ever, including its children. This is determinism. It has got to a point that the idea of a “conflict” is rejected, since the situation is seen as a pure invasion. The Jews of modernity are thus regarded as wholly outside interlopers to an imagined Palestine, when in fact Palestine was always multicultural, subject to migration forces and domination by great powers. I’ve thus got a real concern that Palestinian nationalism, for all its talk of future equality, shares a similar thread of intolerance of difference as the Zionist project. In fact, as the great Palestinian historian and activity Rashid Khalidi said in his The Hundred Years War on Palestine “[T]here are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other.”
But such subtlety now appears to be rejected by many on the left in Australia with dogmatic calls for particular forms of future arrangements that smack of an antidemocratic form of thought and political control, and are devoid of any understanding of the reality of peacemaking in conflict zones, whatever the cause. The result, as we all know, has even been a political nightmare even in Australia as accusations are made about the direct complicity of any number of institutions for any connection to Israel and politicians are accused of heinous crimes well out of their direct control. Many Jews feel unsafe whether or not the threat is real. But as a number of commentators have said, there should be no confusion between the perception of unsafety because of political criticism that upsets a privileged comfort zone and blindness or indifference to the plight of others (as distinct from real antisemitism), and the truly and physically unsafe position of Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.
Of course, the intolerance shown by elements of the left to anything identified as “Zionist” deserves condemnation because it leads to stereotypes and oversimplification.
Consequently, I have greatly regretted the lack of support on the left in Australia for the activist Israeli Jewish left which while a minority in the Israel, has taken on the hard task of standing up for Palestine. This criticism extends to elements of the anti-Zionist Jewish left who appear bereft of any empathy for 50% of the world’s Jews. This lack of support may be due to position that this amounts to “legitimatization” of Jewish -Israeli domination over that of oppressed of Palestinians. I think this is a wrong position to take. Conflict resolution needs people of goodwill from all sides, whatever the shape of final political arrangements, which I hope are based on principles of full and equal rights for all, the end to the occupation and the apartheid system and restorative justice for Palestinians. Huge political & psychological concessions are required by both sides, something hardliners refuse to admit at both ends.
Of course, actions of major Australian Jewish organisations, aligned to dominant political interests in acting as echoes for hasbarah and attacking Israel’s critics has been destructive. Their and others’ attack on universities for alleged and widespread antisemitism is also flawed, exaggerated, highly partisan, and a threat to academic freedom. Crying wolf over antisemitism is destructive to the interests of free political speech. Likewise, uninformed sloganeering, exaggerations and barbs on both sides, and attacks by Zionist or leftist thugs do nothing to progress social cohesion. They detract from political efforts to alter Australian foreign policy to take a strong stand against the Israeli state.
Sadly, I may be wrong in all this and we will be stuck with unceasing violence by the military state, a largely compliant population, continuing repression of Palestians and violent blowback while the world stands by. The US will be constrained by internal weakness to do any thing, and there will be an increased fracture between Israel and a fair proportion of world Jewry, while an unrepentant and fanatical faction pours in money and support and exerts political pressure. Bleak Bleak Bleak.
(edited a bit for clarification)
[The image is “Exterminating the cockroach” Yosi Even Kama came up with these posters about the fascist state in 2010 as part of an art project about how things would be in 2023]
