Alhamdulillah, another day to blog.
This post was shared in one of many facebook groups by Denny Cormier. This is where I first read it and I have to save it here for reference.
It is a well summarised account of how things are by E Andrew Maddox.
I love this quote: Never forget that it is the occupier who is responsible for the nature of the resistance they face.
"On the current situation in Palestine-Israel:
If you are my friend, or even just an acquaintance seeing this post, then I ask that you take 10 minutes to read my reflections on the current situation in Israel-Palestine. Those who know me probably know that I lived in the West Bank as a grad student, that I spent time in Gaza, and that I have devoted years of my life to trying to communicate past the indifference to human suffering that is manufactured by Western media. Some of you may also know that I used to be a Christian Zionist, and that I was an ardent and unquestioning supporter of Israel, until I saw the reality for myself. I was not an easy convert, but if you keep reading I think you will understand why I had no choice but to reconsider my positions if I wanted to claim any sort of integrity or legitimate moral compass.
My friends, colleagues, and former students in Gaza are currently locked inside a prison, in darkness, without electricity or access to clean water or food. Imagine all of the bombing that you are seeing on TV right now, and imagine living under it having no idea what is coming next, having no place to run to, and knowing that the world doesn't care if you live or die. That is the reality for two million people in Gaza right now.
Some harsh truths concerning the current violence in Israel Palestine:
First, Israel has never been a democracy for non-Jews. Period.
Forty percent of Palestinian men spend time in Israeli jails, often without charge. Palestinian men, women, and children are murdered by Israeli settlers and soldiers on a daily basis, with total impunity. Israeli politicians, from the founding of Israel right up to today, have openly called for the genocide of Palestinians, and are carrying it out in slow motion.
We are hearing a lot about Hamas' forces kidnapping Israelis (many of whom are Israeli military personnel and fair game under the laws of war, but plenty of whom appear to be unarmed Israeli civilians as well). So let's pull back and look at both sides of this issue. Palestinian children are kidnapped regularly by Israeli forces, and imprisoned, often for months or years, for nothing. The press just doesn't call it "kidnapping" because the Israeli terrorists wear uniforms and hide behind a complete sham of a legal system. I have personally visited Palestinian kids, 15-year-olds, recovering in the hospital in Nablus after being shot through the legs for throwing rocks at an Israeli military jeep tearing through the streets of their own town, where Israel has no business being. Also consider that every Palestinian adult who has been held without due process (and there are countless thousands) are also kidnapping victims and hostages. Many are using hunger strikes that last months to bring attention to the plight of their people. We rarely hear about this in the Western media.
now let's talk about this word "barbarity", troubling term that keeps getting used to describe the actions of Palestinian forces over the last two days. Let's again pull back and consider the line where military tactics become unjustifiable, that is when they go beyond the bounds of what is an acceptable standard for the rules of engagement in armed conflict. Consider that every single day for the past 56 years Palestinians have been the victims of a nonstop war crime in the form of Israel's settlements and illegal military occupation. That's just the normalized baseline of awful that Palestinians have woken up to every day for over a half century. Next, for the past 16 years Israel has held 2 million Palestinians under a siege in Gaza (an entire generation knows nothing but life under these conditions), making it the largest concentration camp in history. Israel has been called out for Apartheid by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and by Israel's own premier human rights groups. These egregious violations of the 4th Geneva Convention are just the tip of the iceberg in cataloging Israel's war crimes, which include collective punishment, lack of due process, extrajudicial killing, disproportionate force, torture, starvation, systematic carceral child abuse, pogroms, incitement to genocide, targeting civilian areas, forced deportations, house demolitions, etc.
Those who are horrified by the sight of Israelis being attacked in their own communities? Consider that this is a daily occurrence for Palestinians. It's well documented, with plenty of video evidence. It just gets ignored by most Western media outlets. Also note that Israelis in the towns and settlements bordering Gaza have in recent years set up lawn chairs and hosted BBQs as they watch and cheer Israeli fighter jets bombing civilians in Gaza, in massacre after massacre going back more than a decade. Consider that the residents of these Israeli towns, attacked by Palestinian forces this past weekend, all live in the shadow of this massive concentration camp called Gaza, like the Germans who lived next to the extermination camps and who later tried to pretend they knew nothing about what was happening to the Jews inside. They didn't want to know. They had the privilege of ignoring the truth in front of them. Their shameful silence and complicity were exposed by people with guns, by the "liberators" of the camps, who then rounded those Germans up and forced them to confront the reality, bury the bodies, and own the lies that they had told to themselves and to their children. Are there innocent Israelis caught up in all of this? Of course there are. But there are plenty of Israelis who never fired a bullet but who are complicit in this modern crime against humanity.
Palestinians would surely prefer that they did not have to resist. Nobody wants to risk their lives simply demanding to be treated as a human being. But Palestinians did not choose their conditions. Israel did that, for decades, without mercy. Concerning the tactics, if Palestinians had access to guided "surgical" munitions, an air force, and a navy, they would surely use them to wage a more precise and sophisticated war. As it is, they are left to build rockets out of plumbing parts and out of the scraps from the Israeli bombs that are dropped on them. Take that in. Their rockets are quite literally refurbished Israeli bombs that are then fired back at the very nation that dropped them. You don't hear that part in the news about "rocket attacks".
But Palestinians "target civilian areas", you say? So does Israel, and with far deadlier results. But they use "human shields by placing their military installations in civilian areas", you say? The headquarters of the IDF is in the middle of Tel Aviv, and soldiers are embedded in settlements and communities all over Israel.
But what of "Israel's right to exist"?
Every time a single rocket is fired from Gaza, US politicians read from the the AIPAC script, like dears caught in the headlights, affirming that "Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself". But this all begs the question. Is any of this actually self defense? Or is Israel simply fighting for the right to keep acting like a criminal? Who is checking to hold them accountable? Do Palestinians have existential rights? As Israel is constituted it's clear that Palestinians quite plainly do not have the right to exist. All Palestinian efforts to defend themselves are dismissed as the actions of "terrorists". Does that really pass your stink test? Is it really plausible that Palestinians are just evil 100% of the time? Yet try to think of an instance where you have ever heard a Western press outlet mention a single act of justifiable self defense by Palestinians. Just one.
Palestinian self-defense, as a concept, is also not allowed to exist.
So no, in point of fact, and the facts are many, Israel does not have the right to exist. No fascistic terror-state that has been directly inspired by the principles of white supremacy has such a right. Have I gone too far in questioning this sacred right? Am I now an "Antisemite" "calling for the destruction of Israel"?
Consider that many criminal states did not have the right to exist. The Third Reich did not have the right to exist. The Khmer Rouge did not have the right to exist. Apartheid South Africa did not have the right to exist. Not all national projects are legitimate. Some evil projects need to end and be replaced with something that is compatible with peace and justice. Zionism provides no room for either of those things, by it's very design and ambitions and charters. Please read the Likud party charter sometime (hint, it says there should never be a Palestinian state in the West Bank). But don't mistake me for excusing the Israeli Labor party either. The entire Israeli political system is built upon a foundation of ethnic supremacy, colonization, and extermination.
What's more, many groups have suffered and don't have a nation state. Native Americans have inflicted no harm on anyone, suffered repeated genocides for centuries at the hands of the world's preeminent colonial empire, the US, and I don't hear too many people petitioning for their divine right to full sovereignty (though I would certainly welcome it). I'd say that their suffering is at least on par with the tribulations faced by the Jewish people, and their actions and their ideologies raise far fewer concerns than the supporters of the Zionist project in Israel. Yes, the Jewish people have suffered tremendously throughout history and I have no patience for anyone who would attempt to deny or to minimize this fact, but no, Jewish suffering does not come with unique entitlements. Suffering does not entitle anyone to a state if it comes at the cost of inflicting suffering and terror on others. And quite frankly, Germany is responsible for the Holocaust, not the Palestinians.
If you visit the Israeli Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem in Tel Aviv, when you walk out of the exit you are very deliberately guided to an amazing vista of the Israeli countryside, with no indication that those trees cover up the ruins of a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed by Jewish gangs in 1948. Not much further away is the site of the Deir Yassin Massacre, which took place in the same year.
Well before the Holocaust Israel's first and most ardent non-Jewish supporters (Lord Balfour among them) were deeply Antisemitic. They didn't see Palestine/Israel as a safe haven for Jews so much as a receptacle in which they could deposit and be rid of them. And we don't talk about how poorly Holocaust survivors were treated by other Jews when they first arrived to Palestine after the war, or how Arab Jews were treated by Ashkenazi Jews in those early days, or how Ethiopian Jews are treated now. Israel was born with its own master race ideology too, prioritizing the image of a more physically robust yet strictly European Jewish identity. And the parallels don't stop there. Israel has its own version of "lebensraum" as well, which its quite mainstream political proponents refer to as "Eretz Yisrael". The currents of racism and fascism in Zionism are so potent that they have always extended to other Jews as well, and Zionists have always viewed their environs as a unique ethnic entitlement. Even now, Israel's far right is trying to narrow the very definition of what it means to be a Jew and to eliminate the rights of secular Jews. African Jews conspicuously hold the lowest paying professions, something I noticed routinely during my time there. That's before we get to how non-Jewish African migrants are treated in Israel. They have their own ghettoes (familiarize yourselves with the origin of the word "ghetto" for even more perverse irony).
In 1948, just 3 years after the Holocaust, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and a veritable who's who of American Jewish intellectuals and community leaders signed an open letter to the New York Times, calling out the troubling currents of Fascism in Israeli politics. That was the first year of Israel's existence. The contemporary New York Times probably wouldn't even publish that letter now, as it's devolved to little more than a shameless mouthpiece for pro-Israel talking points, going back decades.
And finally, Israel's disingenuous misuse and abuse of the Holocaust and Antisemitism make Jews less safe by cheapening the weight of those terms. It's an insult to all who have survived or perished by acts of genocide to use such events as a smokescreen to distract from war crimes.
End Israel's illegal military occupation and end its Apartheid regime. Those are the roots of all of the violence that we are seeing now. That is where we should place the blame for Palestinian oppression and suffering and for the extreme actions Palestinians have taken in response to it. It all traces back to those crimes against humanity. If you care about the Jewish people then boycott Israel and hold it to account until it stops conflating and distorting Jewish identity with Zionism, with settler colonialism, and with Apartheid. Those things have nothing to do with Judaism or with Jewishness.
Free Palestine! And free Israelis from the burden of maintaining their hateful and unjust system. There can and truly should be one state for all. No matter what the nay sayers say, far crazier aspirations have been realized in the pursuit of a just peace. There are plenty of functional democracies built on far shakier ground. When we look at how the US came into existence, the evils that we've perpetrated and had to contend with, our bloody civil war, our institutionalized oppression of so many different groups, the fact that most people within our borders could not even vote for most of our history, and the evils that we have yet to address, I see American democracy as a far more unlikely miracle than a one state solution for Palestinians and Israelis".
And below is another good summary by Al Jazeera:
