As a Jew and Fighter for Human Rights, I Stand with Palestine!
Colonized people have a right to resist, as Malcolm X put it, by any means necessary.
The latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East raises familiar questions: What provoked it? Who’s the perpetrator and who’s the victim?
A popular claim is that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle; that there are good and bad actors on both sides; that each side has just grievances. But this logical fallacy obfuscates the current reality. International law recognizes that occupied, colonized populations have a right to resist. As with any unjust use of force—be it a street mugging, occupation, or outright slavery—the victim has the right to resist and fight back by any means necessary. The perpetrator—the robber, occupier, slave master—has no moral basis to complain that their victim is fighting back “unfairly”. The oppressor is responsible for all of the violence that ensues, from their own instigating aggression to their victim’s defensive response.
Hypocrisy abounds in politics and political commentary. The US has cozied up to dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Samoza’s Nicaragua, Batista’s Cuba, Pinochet’s Chile, Shah Reza Pahlavi’s Iran, Apartheid South Africa and dozens of other places, large and small. Opponents of these repressive regimes are routinely labeled “militants” and “terrorists”.
They’ll call you a terrorist if you are fighting poverty and want
But you’re a freedom fighter if you kill for GM or Dupont
In this Orwellian scenario the worst crooks are at large
They will carpet bomb whole countries just to keep themselves in charge
Lyrics from the song, Bad Guys, by Bruce Lesnick
From its founding in 1948, the state of Israel has been predicated on the Zionist notion that Jews migrating from Europe and elsewhere had a superior claim to the land of Palestine than its three-quarters of a million indigenous inhabitants. To create a theocratic state where Jews would have a permanent majority, Palestinians were removed and stripped of their rights. The dispossessed Palestinians and their descendants today number over five million.
That Palestinians today are second-class citizens in Israel and the occupied territories is beyond dispute. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem all categorize Israel as an apartheid state. Today’s conflict must be understood in this context. The Gaza Strip, home to 2.5 million Palestinians, has been run as a concentration camp by the Israeli government since 2005. Residents are not allowed to freely come and go. A blockade has kept food and other essential resources at bare subsistence levels. Now, according to B’Tselem,
A criminal policy of revenge is underway. Since Saturday [October 7, 2023], Israel has dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on Gaza. Netanyahu’s call for residents to leave is a farce with no bearing on reality. The Gaza Strip is closed off on all sides and the residents have no way out. There are no shelters and no way to seek cover from airstrikes. Among the people killed, some of them still trapped under debris, are entire families wiped out in a single bombardment – including at least 140 minors and 105 women. The death toll is rising by the minute.
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The decision to imprison Gaza even more tightly than usual has also been implemented. The crossings are closed and goods cannot be brought in. Israel has disconnected Gaza from the power grid and the population now depends on the small local power plant, which will only hold out for several days until the diesel fuel runs out. Water is also in short supply: almost all the water extracted in Gaza requires desalination or purification to drink, and these rely on electricity. Israel has also cut back on the water it sells to Gaza, and part of the water network has been damaged by bombing.
There is no justification for these actions, which constitute war crimes openly ordered by top Israeli officials.
In an excellent article summarizing the current conflict, Chris Hedges draws a parallel with the World War II, Nazi-occupied Warsaw Ghetto,
…Marek Edelman, was the deputy commander of the uprising and the only leader to survive the war.
The Nazis had sealed 400,000 Polish Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto. The trapped Jews died in the thousands, from starvation, disease and indiscriminate violence. When the Nazis began to transport the remaining Jews to the extermination camps the resistance fighters fought back. None expected to survive.
Edelman, after the war, condemned Zionism as a racist ideology used to justify the theft of Palestinian land. He sided with the Palestinians, supported their armed resistance and met frequently with Palestinians leaders. He thundered against Israel’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify its repression of the Palestinian people.
While Israel dined out on the mythology of the ghetto uprising, it treated the only surviving leader of the uprising, who refused to leave Poland, as a pariah. Edelman understood that the lesson of the Holocaust and the ghetto uprising was not that Jews are morally superior or eternal victims. History, Edelman said, belongs to everyone. The oppressed, including the Palestinians, had a right to fight for equality, dignity and liberty.
“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors,” Edelman said.
The Warsaw uprising has long inspired the Palestinians. Representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used to lay a wreath at the annual commemoration of the uprising in Poland at the Warsaw Ghetto monument.
The more violence the colonizer expends to subdue the occupied, the more it transforms itself into a monster.
Politicians and the mainstream media try to paint the Israel-Palestine conflict as nuanced and complicated. It’s not. A group of mostly Europeans has laid claim to land that was occupied by others. To enforce their unjust claim, the occupiers have dispossessed and disenfranchised the indigenous population and relegated them to Bantustans. When the Palestinians resist, as they are now doing, they are slaughtered—a cycle of violence the Israelis call “mowing the lawn”.
Of course, we deplore the killing of innocents on both sides. But how do we assign responsibility for this bloodshed? Consider, for comparison, the Nat Turner slave rebellion in the US in 1831. Turner and dozens of other black slaves banded together to kill Turner’s master, his wife, and his children. They then went on to slay neighboring slave masters and their families. As many as 60 were killed in all. The question is, who is chiefly responsible for that carnage? Turner and his men, or the system of slavery and those who established, promoted and profited by it? This is likely an uncomfortable question for supporters of Israel. Either they have to condemn African Americans for resisting slavery or admit that the responsibility for the violence in Israel-Palestine rests with those who established, promoted and have profited by the Israeli apartheid system.
Jewish or not, there is only one side for justice-loving people to take in this prolonged conflict:
End the occupation!
Honor the UN-mandated right of Palestinians to return to their homes!
For a democratic, secular Palestine with equal rights for all!
Not one US dollar, bomb or bullet for the Israeli war machine!
Thank you Bruce, I’m glad Glenn Greenwald read your comment so I could find your Substack. It sounds so clear the way you lay it out. I grew up Jewish in a Jewish neighborhood and was told from very young childhood that we were the chosen people. We were better than everyone else. Such bullshit.
How many instances of the Polish or French resistance in Nazi occupied Europe can you provide of the resistants attacking German civilians, raping women and kidnapping people? Occupied people do have the right to resist but by ANY MEANS? The humanist interpretation is that violence should be the last resort only when other means have run out, furthermore that even when you do use force there are rules of engagement you follow. Do you disagree?
While it is true that there is huge hostility to the Arab side by the right wing in Israel, this is the result of decades of war. Whereas the whole "Israel is colonial" line is a contrived calumny. Simon Sebag Montefiore recently wrote a rebuttal here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/decolonization-narrative-dangerous-and-false/675799/
I find it fascinating that so many leftist Jews have fallen so deeply into the antizionist line. (I am neither Arab, Muslim or Jewish in case you wonder about my own background) Many in Australia have woken up by this terrorist attack and have received a rude shock that the left is now a greater threat to Jews than the hard right.