On contradictions - Adam Shatz in LRB:

“In the words of Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist who spent many years reporting from Gaza, ‘Gaza embodies the central contradiction of the state of Israel – democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.’ Israelis don’t say ‘go to hell’, they say ‘go to Gaza.’ The occupation authorities have always treated it as a frontier land, more like southern Lebanon than the West Bank, where different, and much harsher, rules apply. After the conquest of Gaza in 1967, Ariel Sharon, then the general responsible for Israel’s southern command, oversaw the execution without trial of dozens of Palestinians suspected of involvement in resistance (it’s unclear how many died), and the demolition of thousands of homes: this was called ‘pacification’. In 2005, Sharon presided over ‘disengagement’: Israel withdrew eight thousand settlers from Gaza, but it remained essentially under Israeli control, and since Hamas was elected in 2006 it has been under blockade, which the Egyptian government helps enforce. ‘Why don’t we abandon this Gaza and flee?’ Kanafani’s narrator asked in 1956. Today, such musings would be a fantasy. The people of Gaza – it’s not accurate to call them Gazans, since two-thirds of them are the children and grandchildren of refugees from other parts of Palestine – are effectively captives in a territory that has been amputated from the rest of their homeland. They could leave Gaza only if the Israelis ordered them to take up residence in a ‘humanitarian corridor’ in the Sinai, if Egypt were to submit to American pressure and open up the border.”

(…)

“ It achieved a grisly success: for the first time since 1948, it was Palestinian fighters, not Israeli soldiers, who occupied towns at the border and terrorised their inhabitants. Never has Israel looked less like a sanctuary for the Jewish people. As Mahmoud Muna, the owner of a bookshop in Jerusalem, said, the impact of Hamas’s attack was ‘like shrinking the whole last hundred years into a week’. Yet this shattering of the status quo, this blow for a kind of morbid equality with Israel’s formidable war machine, has exacted a huge price.
The fighters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – brigades of roughly 1500 commandos – killed more than a thousand civilians, including women, children and babies. It remains unclear why Hamas wasn’t satisfied after achieving its initial objectives. The first phase of Al-Aqsa Flood was classic – and legitimate – guerrilla warfare against an occupying power: fighters broke through the Gaza border and fence, and attacked military outposts. The early images of this assault, along with reports that fighters from Gaza had moved into twenty Israeli towns, gave rise to understandable euphoria among Palestinians; so did the killing of hundreds of Israeli soldiers, and the taking of as many as 250 hostages. In the West, few remember that when Palestinians from Gaza protested at the border in 2018-19 during the Great March of Return, Israeli forces killed 223 demonstrators. But Palestinians do, and the killing of unarmed demonstrators has only added to the allure of armed struggle.”

(…)

“Nothing in the history of Palestinian armed resistance to Israel approaches the scale of this massacre – not the 1972 Munich Olympics attack by Black September, not the Maalot massacre by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1974. More Israelis died on 7 October than in the five years of the Second Intifada. How to explain this carnival of killing? The rage fuelled by the intensification of Israeli repression is surely one reason. Over the last year, more than two hundred Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and settlers; many of them were minors. But this rage has much deeper roots than the policies of Netanyahu’s right-wing government. What happened on 7 October was not an explosion; it was a methodical act of killing, and the systematic murder of people in their homes was a bitter mimicry of the 1982 massacre by Israeli-backed Phalangists in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. The calculated posting of videos of the killings on the social media accounts of the victims suggests that revenge was among the motives of Hamas’s commanders: Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, lost his wife and two children in an airstrike in 2014. One is reminded of Frantz Fanon’s observation that ‘the colonised person is a persecuted person who constantly dreams of becoming the persecutor.’ On 7 October, this dream was realised for those who crossed over into southern Israel: finally, the Israelis would feel the helplessness and terror they had known all their lives. The spectacle of Palestinian jubilation – and the later denials that the killing of civilians had occurred – was troubling but hardly surprising. In colonial wars, Fanon writes, ‘good is quite simply what hurts them most.’”

(…)

“Many analogies have been proposed for Al-Aqsa Flood: the Tet Offensive, Pearl Harbor, Egypt’s attack in October 1973, which started the Yom Kippur War, and, of course, 9/11. But the most suggestive analogy is a pivotal, and largely forgotten, episode in the Algerian War of Independence: the Philippeville uprising of August 1955. Encircled by the French army, fearful of losing ground to reformist Muslim politicians who favoured a negotiated settlement, the FLN launched a gruesome attack in and around the harbour town of Philippeville. Peasants armed with grenades, knives, clubs, axes and pitchforks killed – and in many cases disembowelled – 123 people, mostly Europeans but also a number of Muslims. To the French, the violence seemed unprovoked, but the perpetrators believed they were avenging the killing of tens of thousands of Muslims by the French army, assisted by settler militias, after the independence riots of 1945. In response to Philippeville, France’s liberal governor-general, Jacques Soustelle, whom the European community considered an untrustworthy ‘Arab lover’, carried out a campaign of repression in which more than ten thousand Algerians were killed. By over-reacting, Soustelle fell into the FLN’s trap: the army’s brutality drove Algerians into the arms of the rebels, just as Israel’s ferocious response is likely to strengthen Hamas at least temporarily, even among Palestinians in Gaza who resent its authoritarian rule. Soustelle himself admitted that he had helped dig ‘a moat through which flowed a river of blood’.”

(…)

“The sadism of Hamas’s attack has made this Nazification much easier, rekindling collective memories, passed down from one generation to the next, of pogroms and the Holocaust. That Jews, both in Israel and the diaspora, have sought explanations for their suffering in the history of antisemitic violence is only to be expected. Intergenerational trauma is as real among Jews as it is among Palestinians, and Hamas’s attack touched the rawest part of their psyche: their fear of annihilation. But memory can also be blinding. Jews long ago ceased to be the helpless pariahs, the internal ‘others’ of the West. The state that claims to speak in their name has one of the world’s most powerful armies – and a nuclear arsenal, the only one in the region. The atrocities of 7 October may be reminiscent of pogroms, but Israel is not the Pale of Settlement.”

(…)

“In Europe, expression of support for Palestinians has become taboo, and in some cases criminalised. The Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli was told that the award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair for her novel Minor Detail, based on the true story of a Palestinian Bedouin girl who was raped and killed by Israeli soldiers in 1949, had been cancelled. France has banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and the French police have used water cannon to disperse a rally in support of Gaza in the place de la République. The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, has floated plans to ban the display of the Palestinian flag. The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, declared that Germany’s ‘responsibility arising from the Holocaust’ obliged it to ‘stand up for the existence and security of the state of Israel’ and blamed all of Gaza’s suffering on Hamas. One of the few Western officials to express horror over what is happening in Gaza was Dominique de Villepin, France’s former prime minister. On France Inter, he railed against the West’s ‘amnesia’ over Palestine, the ‘oblivion’ that enabled Europeans to imagine that economic agreements and arms sales between Israel and its new Arab friends in the Gulf would cause the Palestinian question to disappear. On 14 October, Ione Belarra, Spain’s social rights minister and a member of the left-wing party Podemos, went even further, accusing Israel of genocidal collective punishment and calling for Netanyahu to be put on trial for war crimes. But Tlaib, Villepin and Belarra have been far outnumbered by the Western politicians and pundits who have sided with Israel as the ‘civilised’ party in the conflict, exercising its ‘right to defend itself’ against the barbarous Arabs. Discussion of the occupation, of the roots of the conflict, is increasingly conflated with antisemitism.
Jewish ‘friends of Israel’ may consider this a triumph. But, as Traverso points out, the West’s uncritical support of Israel, and its identification with Jewish suffering over and above that of Palestinian Muslims, ‘promotes a movement of Jews into the structures of domination’. Worse, the abandonment of neutrality regarding Israel’s conduct places Jews in the diaspora at increasing risk of antisemitic violence, whether from jihadi groups or lone wolves.”

(…)

“In A Dying Colonialism, he paid eloquent tribute to non-Muslims in Algeria who, together with their Muslim comrades, imagined a future in which Algerian identity and citizenship would be defined by common ideals, not ethnicity or faith. That this vision perished, thanks to French violence and the FLN’s authoritarian Islamic nationalism, is a tragedy from which Algeria still has not recovered. The destruction of this vision, upheld by intellectuals such as Edward Said and a small but influential minority of Palestinian and Israeli leftists, has been no less damaging for the people of Israel-Palestine.”

(…)

“But the radical left’s cult of force is less dangerous, because less consequential, than that of Israel and its backers, starting with the Biden administration. For Netanyahu, the war is a fight for survival – his own as much as Israel’s. He has generally preferred tactical manoeuvres, shying away from full-scale offensives. While he has led Israel in several assaults on Gaza, he is also an architect of entente with Hamas, a position he justified in 2019 at a meeting of Likud members of the Knesset, where he said that ‘anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas’. Netanyahu understood that as long as Hamas was in charge in Gaza, there would be no negotiations over Palestinian statehood. Hamas’s offensive not only shattered his wager that the fragile equilibrium between Israel and Gaza would hold; it came at a time when he was simultaneously fending off bribery charges and a protest movement, sparked by his plan to erode the power of the judiciary and remake the country’s political system along Orbánised lines. Desperate to overcome these setbacks, he has thrown himself into this war, casting it as a ‘struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. Israel’s homegrown settler fascists, represented in his cabinet by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, both open advocates of ethnic cleansing, have killed several Palestinians in the West Bank since the Hamas attack (including those killed by the army, the death toll there is more than sixty). Palestinian citizens of Israel are fearful of the kind of attacks they suffered at the hands of Jewish gangs in May 2021, during the Unity Intifada. As for the people of Gaza, not only are they being forced to pay for Hamas’s actions; they are being forced, once again, to pay for Hitler’s crimes. And the imperative of invoking the Holocaust has become Israel’s ideological Iron Dome, its shield against any criticism of its conduct.
What is Netanyahu’s ultimate aim? Eliminating Hamas? That is impossible. For all of Israel’s efforts to paint it as the Palestinian branch of the Islamic State, and as reactionary and violent as it is, Hamas is an Islamic nationalist organisation, not a nihilist cult, and a part of Palestinian political society; it feeds on the despair produced by the occupation, and cannot simply be liquidated any more than the fascist zealots in Netanyahu’s cabinet (or, for that matter, the terrorists of the Irgun, who carried out bombings and massacres in the 1940s and later became part of Israel’s political establishment). The assassination of Hamas leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, both killed in 2004, did nothing to impede the organisation’s growing influence and even assisted it. Does Netanyahu imagine, then, that he can force Palestinians to give up their weapons, or their demands for statehood, by bombing them into submission? That has been tried, over and again; the invariable result has been a new and even more embittered generation of Palestinian militants. Israel is not a paper tiger, as Hamas’s leaders concluded after 7 October, still exulting from the experience of killing Israeli soldiers asleep in their beds. But it is increasingly incapable of changing course, because its political class lacks the imagination and creativity – not to mention the sense of justice, of other people’s dignity – required to pursue a lasting agreement.
A responsible American administration, one less susceptible to anxieties about an upcoming election and less beholden to the pro-Israel establishment, would have taken advantage of the current crisis to urge Israel to re-examine not just its security doctrine but its policies towards the sole population in the Arab world with whom it has shown no interest in forging a real peace: the Palestinians. Instead, Biden and Blinken have echoed Israel’s banalities about fighting evil, while conveniently forgetting Israel’s responsibility for the political impasse in which it finds itself. American credibility in the region, never very strong, is even weaker than it was under the Trump administration.” (…)

“The only thing that can save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba – a real possibility, while another Holocaust remains a traumatic hallucination – is a political solution that recognises both as equal citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.”

Read the article here.

This is a good, insightful article, and it’s especially good because it refers to an almost forgotten war, the Algerian war.

Nevertheless, a few questions. When does the refugee stops being a refugee? Am I still a German? Well, officially, I can reclaim my German passport, and I might be forced to do that one day, but the question is of the essence: how far do you have to go back in history to undo the injustices of the past? And when becomes this process just a recipe for new injustices?

The claim that the acknowledgement of the genocide of the European Jews comes at the expense of other people is troubling, because it opens the door for a competition in suffering. Of course, this door has already been opened, it’s wide open. But should we accept that there is nothing but this competition, the Jews had their day in the spotlight, now it’s somebody else’s turn? Shatz seems to accept that antisemitism is still a risk, mainly or at least partly also because of Israel, but he also seems to invite the Jews in Europe to put the sign “I’m not a Zionist” on the door, so they can be spared.
I’m doubtful if this sign is going to help.

In Europe and elsewhere Muslims are the primary other, but that doesn’t mean that antisemitism had faded away, or that we should understand antisemitism of racism for that matter as a legitimate concern by antisemites and racists, just ther language is a bit harsh.

If the US decides that Israel is a not a valuable asset anymore all bets are off.
Jews might be considered white, or colonists or supporters of colonists, they will be killed because there are Jews. Eighty years ago, or so Jews were labeled bolshevists and were slaughtered because there were bolshevists – and indeed many non-Jewish bolshevists were killed – but what really mattered was that they were Jewish. The rationalization is exactly what it is, a story to explain a crime.
Those who hate refugees because the refugee is the ideal scapegoat, might wrap their hatred in seemingly legitimate concerns, what really counts is that they needed a scapegoat.

As this article makes clear, albeit with some hesitation, is that both the right and the left are in desperate need of a scape goat, an enemy to ridicule, to maim, to kill.

If Israel is a colonial state, the state needs to be dismantled. How this will work with nuclear weapons in the Negev is an open question. I wrote already earlier, only in Dutch, that the Jews maybe could put some nuclear weapons in their backpacks while swimming to Europe.

The safety of the Jews is as fragile as the safety of many other minorities. That there are worthy and less worthy victims, and that it all depends on who you ask, is clear to any person willing to open the eyes.
What remains unclear is what the consequences are of all this.
What I do know is that almost no one in Europe or in the US is willing to die for Kyiv, Gaza or Tel Aviv.
Dying is for the lesser ones. Moralizing and debating are for the masters who sometimes seem to be unwilling to recognize that they are masters.