Quote:
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"The assumption is that Israel has at one point been moral. But the question of what to do with the natives began not with the siege of Gaza, not with the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not with the nakba, but with European Jewish settlement in Palestine"
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this comment came appended to the side of an article about a kinda cool palestinian short film, a space exodus. the article is here:
"A Space Exodus": A Truly Palestinian Film
the film here:
there is an entirely legitimate counter-narrative based in the unfortunate experience of palestinians who have been herded about after expropriation, stuck in camps to rot since the 40s in some cases, subjected to serious brutalization since 67 in the name of the greater israel...colonial occupation dressed up as "the settlement program"...the economic crippling of the palestinian population, war crimes in gaza. on and on.
because i am neither palestinian nor israeli, i can have a simpler viewpoint.
i see no connection between anti-semitism and criticism of current israeli policy. but the ideological origins of israel make the separation delicate, i think, something that has to be periodically reiterated and understood between speakers in a conversation, made clear. so the separation ends up a matter of good faith between the speakers in an exchange.
it's possible to argue that the wrong sort of zionism had won by the early 50s, and that the sort of zionism that won has turned out to be racist (in its more rightwing forms) and its dominance has made of israel a de facto apartheid state. sp it is possible to simultaneously hold a zionist position and be very critical of the form of zionism that's come to dominate via the israeli right. i am not personally a zionist.
the problems between israelis and palestinians follow from political choices and nothing else. it seems to me that all of these unfortunate realities could be otherwise with different choices. which on it's own disconnects any such critique from a matter of imaginary "essence" to do with a people or religion.
i recognize there are more and less difficult issues...i personally support the right of return, but understand the argument to the contrary. i think that argument raises a basic question about the idea of a "religious" or "jewish" state as over against a secular nation-state (with all the qualifications about that category in place)...which seems, in turn, to recapitulate the basic intractability of some of these issues. this is a classical liberal type problem, a question in which either answer (support or oppose the right of return) results in one or the other party feeling that something fundamental about themselves gets erased.
the wider political questions are easier in that the basic ground the work on is a bit clearer. but the main one is the settlements. i think they are *the* central problem in the region and that they really have to be taken down. all of them. and there are no doubt heated arguments that could follow from and about that. but they're political questions, really.
unless you are on the ground on one side or the other.
not least because the brutality of colonialism makes everyone pathological. on this, fanon was right in wretched of the earth (in particular)...