The Left Is Not “Anti-Jewish”
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- Written by DAVE ZIRIN, The Nation DAVE ZIRIN, The Nation
- Published: 10 November 2023 10 November 2023
What we are witnessing is an effort to get people to see slogans like “Free Palestine” as anti-Semitic and the protests as threats to Jewish existence.
Two States: To the Palestinian Peace Movement: A Plea for Solidarity
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- Written by Gilbert Schramm Gilbert Schramm
- Published: 10 November 2023 10 November 2023
(…and why a “one-state solution” is probably off the table)
I know that my thoughts on this issue will displease many. I am used to it. I know there are many serious, deeply sincere proponents of Palestinian rights and a just peace who have supported a so called one-state solution. Many of us, myself included, have continued to support the two-state option. Because the slaughter in Gaza is so relentless today, and a quick end to the violence there is desperately needed, it is imperative that advocates of human rights agree on a viable endgame for a just peace in Palestine. Only then can we present a coherent case to the wider world. Time is of the essence.
Read more: Two States: To the Palestinian Peace Movement: A Plea for Solidarity
Gaza Ghetto: Lessons from History
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- Written by Gilbert Schramm Gilbert Schramm
- Published: 06 November 2023 06 November 2023
It is hard for many people to get their heads around what is happening in Gaza today. Whatever “side” you are on, the sheer brutality is hard to bear. Israel seems bent on amplifying a strategy that has never worked before. There are certain points on which reference to history really sheds a clear light on this ongoing carnage (and on why it will probably fail to bring peace).
In 2006, Hezbollah in Lebanon staged a raid on an Israeli patrol across its immediate border with Israel. Israel responded with overwhelming, disproportionate force (as they are doing in Gaza today). They claimed they would eliminate the threat of Hezbollah once and for all (like they are claiming about Hamas in Gaza today). Their attack killed many hundreds of Lebanese civilians and wreaked havoc on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. There were immediate calls for a ceasefire (just like today), but the US resisted them for a long time, falsely believing they could give Israel time and cover to ‘finish the job’ (just like today). Both the US and Israel ended in an embarrassed retreat. In fact, Hezbollah inflicted enormous pain on Israeli forces and emerged stronger than before. This was basically the formula for every one of the repeated attacks Israel has launched against Hamas in the years since then.
In a 2014 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Henry Siegman, a very reputable Jewish-American leader, spoke out about Palestinian resistance (https://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/13/henry_siegman_leading_us_jewish_voice). He basically said that the Palestinians had never done anything that the extreme Zionists who now lead Israel had not tried before. My own research bears this out. I think he was thinking in particular about Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1940s.
Siegman grew up with a father who was a noted Zionist. Guests at the family dinner table included Yitzhak Rabin, later to become the Israeli PM who, when he moved towards peace, was assassinated by a Jewish terrorist. Siegman later became convinced that Zionism had taken a tragic turn and spoke out against it. Of all the many horrors of the last century, the episode of the Warsaw Ghetto is surely the best scenario to compare with the slaughter in Gaza today.
When ‘never again’ becomes a war cry
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- Written by Natasha Roth-Rowland Natasha Roth-Rowland
- Published: 30 October 2023 30 October 2023
When ‘never again’ becomes a war cry
In an Israeli war that has been retrofitted onto a Holocaust template, it is obscene that a plea to stop further killing is now read as moral failure.
A convoy of Israeli tanks at sunset near the southern Israeli border with Gaza, October 12, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
This article was produced in partnership with Diaspora Alliance.
In a 60 Minutes interview less than a week after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel, which killed over 1,400 Israelis and saw over 200 more abducted to the Gaza Strip, U.S. President Joe Biden said that the Palestinian Islamist movement had “engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.” The assessment joined a catalog of statements by Israeli, American, and other politicians and commentators who have explicitly linked the Oct. 7 massacres to the Nazi genocide, whether by citing the attacks as the biggest loss of Jewish life since World War II, or by portraying Hamas as Nazi-like or Nazi successors.
Biden’s antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, for example, tweeted the day after the attack that it was “the most lethal assault against Jews since the Holocaust”; not long after, the U.S. Holocaust Museum put out a similar tweet. Israeli politicians have also helped drive this discourse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last week that “Hamas are the new Nazis … And just as the world united to defeat the Nazis … the world has to stand united behind Israel to defeat Hamas.” Netanyahu expressed similar sentiments to French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday.
The rhetorical value of casting your enemies as Nazis — which the Israeli right and its supporters frequently do when discussing Palestinians writ large — is the way it suggests, implicitly or explicitly, that there is only one logical, even moral, course of action: the complete elimination of the Nazi-designates and anyone deemed to be affiliated with them.
Thus is the current discourse awash with unabashed calls for genocide and ethnic cleansing, issued from a distressingly broad array of sources, and egged on by the idea that, in the words of a columnist in Israel’s most widely-read newspaper, “Hamas and the Gazans are one and the same.”
Indeed, the constant invocation of the Holocaust seems to have done little to sensitize those calling for Gaza’s destruction to its lessons. In addition to the demands for vengeful mass killings and the abundant references to Palestinians as “animals,” Nazi-like imagery has also been making the rounds among hasbarists on social media; in one drawing that could have come straight out of Der Stürmer, an IDF boot is pictured about to step on a cockroach with the head of a Hamas fighter.
Gaza: Ceasefire Now!
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- Written by Gilbert Schramm Gilbert Schramm
- Published: 29 October 2023 29 October 2023
A few days ago, an Israeli army spokesman uttered one of those absurdly ironic statements that are typical in the current conflict. He argued that Israel ‘had to attack Hamas’ because they were ‘living on Israel’s doorstep.’ When you steal someone’s house and evict them with brutal violence, it is not surprising to find them on your doorstep. Does that justify exterminating them or justify driving them into a different neighborhood? Most civilized people would say not.
Egypt is getting roundly criticized for not opening their Rafah border crossing. Their reasons are quite clear. First, they don’t want 2 million Palestinian refugees living on their border with Israel and they don’t want to have continued Palestinian resistance staged from within their borders. That would inevitably lead to another Israeli/Egyptian war. Their second reason is perhaps more principled—they refuse to collaborate in the further ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. This is why Hamas itself is urging residents of Gaza to remain. It is largely why they do remain.