12 January 2008

DIVESTMENT, SOUTH AFRICA, AND PALESTINE

After viewing the recent documentary film, Have You Heard From Johannesburg?: Apartheid and the Club of the West, I began to wonder, of course, about Palestine. The film highlights the ultimately successful 1980s anti-apartheid movement for US divestment from dealings with the racist government of South Africa. (Divestment is the un-investing of funds or the selling off of stock or property from a particular ethically odious source, a moral cleaning-out of the wallet meant to pressure bad guys to behave better.) Many Middle East commentators have long predicted that divestment from Israel will be the only successful strategy in ending what I will call—for now—the great Israeli crime against Palestine, and some have suggested that we use the anti-apartheid divestment movement as an example of—and a blueprint for—how it’s done.

I wrote in June 2006’s inaugural Palestine Report, “I want us to free Palestine, and I want for it to be a meaningful freedom. Apartheid was brought down in South Africa, in the end, by Western divestment from South African industries and markets, caused in turn by boisterous speaking-out on the part of good-hearted regular folks like us. This is entirely possible.”

And it is. However, there are some serious differences between the two struggles, differences that make the task facing the movement for divestment from Israel and from Western companies doing business with Israel (a movement that, as I write, is in its infancy) significantly more challenging than that facing the movement for divestment from South Africa in the 1980s.

For one, the major venue for the anti-apartheid movement was a USA still coming to terms with the black-white racial unrest of the 1960s and the changes it wrought. Myriad political careers had been ruined by supporting the wrong side in that struggle, and white politicians and other power-wielders of the 1980s weren’t about to repeat the mistakes of their unfortunate predecessors. Put in a more positive fashion, the anti-apartheid movement in USA bore witness to various instances of long-overdue black-white cooperation in city halls, state senates, and university boardrooms. In less polite circles, some refer to this phenomenon as white guilt, which in the political arena allegedly led white politicians in the 1970s and 80s to compensate for the racism of their parents or their previous selves by eagerly supporting African-American interests.

In the anti-occupation movement for divestment from Israel, however, there are none of these pre-existing conditions, particularly in USA. For the most part, Americans harbor no guilt and very little sympathy for what is being done to the Arab peoples of Palestine. In fact, a significant portion of Americans’ collective sympathy is aimed at followers of the Jewish faith, for the suffering they bore under the nightmarish aim of Hitler’s merciless death machine, though the perpetrators of the genocide in Palestine are fundamentalists of this very faith. Oversimply, the oppressed have become the oppressors, but still receive the sympathy due the oppressed.

So, to overcome these differences, which involve the prevailing cultural psychology of the time, the movement for divestment from Israel must arm itself with powerful media tools capable of seriously mustering the world’s sympathy, rendering it the case that the prevailing cultural psychology of our next generation is one of deep sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians and immense disgust at the fact that the Jewish faith, whose followers suffered so greatly in what has come to be called the Holocaust, has been mutineered by ultra-Zionist expansionist warmongers, who are now passing on the suffering to another people, and who have (and this is the really sick part of it all), for half a century now, engineered the prevailing cultural psychology such that any criticism of their plan for the ethnic cleansing and re-populating of Palestinian lands is readily and commonly viewed as anti-Semitism and thus disregarded, allowing their nefarious plan to go smoothly forward not only uncontested, but aided and popularly defended, and largely funded by American taxpayers.

I suggest, therefore, that the movement for divestment from Israel learn not only from the engineers of the both poetic and effective movement for divestment from South Africa, but also from the Zionists themselves.

To that end, Norman Finkelstein argues that the concept, “the Holocaust,” is “an ideological representation” of the historical event we know as the Holocaust. “Like most ideologies,” he writes, “it bears a connection, if tenuous, with reality.” That is, it’s a distortion of reality, and how it was done—how Zionism built its ideology around the Holocaust—is in the end a matter of language, of using the right words.

For example, the singular name by which the mid-century genocide of European Jews came to be known, the Holocaust, the name itself, has been a valuable tool in the hands of the Zionist spin-machine. It names the “ideological representation” Finkelstein mentions, and only by deploying this singular name was Zionism able to deploy its ideology. And through the deployment of this ideology, as Finkelstein explains, “one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state.” This in part explains how Israel has gotten away with occupying Palestine for more than 50 years, committing numerous well-documented war crimes and violating just about every universal code of military conduct, with nary a protestation being raised. The world has overwhelmingly stood by and watched it happen. (By comparison, American troops were in the air hours after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1992. Needless to say, Hussein didn’t have the right friends.)

None of this could have been possible without Zionism’s unrelenting campaign of media spin, without the engineering of our cultural psychology, without what Finkelstein calls “the Holocaust industry.” The anti-occupation movement for divestment from Israel, to even get off the ground, must tear down what Zionism has built, must reset our cultural psychology.

As a starting point, I suggest that we turn on its nose the language we use with regard to the “Arab-Israeli conflict.” Take that very epithet, for example. It is a conflict, but it’s much more. It’s many massacres. It’s an unfair fight. It’s hell. It’s a genocide unfolding before our eyes, different in kind from the rapid monstrous genocides of the 20th century—the Armenian and Rwandan genocides and the Holocaust come to mind—but a systematic cultural and ethnic cleansing, a genocide, nonetheless. (And there lies a twisted irony in the fact that that this is a genocide borne of, and almost hidden beneath, another genocide.)

Specifically, I suggest that the slow genocide being committed against the people of Palestine be given, like the Holocaust, a singular moniker (rather than various commentators referring to it here and there as “the occupation,” or “the Zionist crime,” or “the Palestinian tragedy,” or “the struggle for Palestine”).

Just as Zionism deployed its ideological construct of the Holocaust in order to justify its crimes to its friends and to silence its enemies, the movement for divestment from Israel must deploy an ideology of truth around the grave injustice being committed in Palestine. We must give it a name and tell the whole world of it.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ANTI-SEMITISM

To those who are already thinking me an anti-Semite, pause and ask whether it’s because what I’ve written above is genuinely religiously prejudicial in nature or because it sounds like other stuff that has been called anti-Semitism. I think you’ll have to admit the latter. Many statements and actions that are not at all anti-Semitic are often publicly called anti-Semitic, and anyone who disagrees is also called anti-Semitic, and thus disregarded.

For example, Michael Lerner (thinker, author, and editor of Tikkun) recounts the story of growing up in a mainstream American Zionist family and being essentially forbidden as a young man from saying anything critical of Israel, which he describes as being a common experience for many young progressive-minded Jewish folks growing up in postwar Europe, USA, and Israel. Lerner has made it his career to challenge the pervasiveness of Zionist thinking within the Jewish mainstream, and has consequently encountered myriad professional and personal doors being slammed in his face.

Consider also Finkelstein’s career. He’s a brilliant Jewish American scholar who also made a career of anti-Zionism, who made arguments like those I’m making here long before I ever did, and who was consequently denied tenure at DePaul University and shunned by the Jewish American intelligentsia in general (after prominent ultra-Zionist Alan Dershowitz ran his name through the mud all over the mainstream media).

It’s a kind of media fascism, and it has trained us to think that statements like those I’m making in this article are anti-Semitic, dangerous, and prejudicial…but they simply are not. To say that a minority within the Jewish faith formed a political movement known as Zionism that has, since 1967 at least, been led by fundamentalist types who seek the Israeli annexation of the remaining Palestinian lands and who, in their efforts to reach this end, have waged a very, very well-organized PR and lobby campaign that has garnered them immense political and financial support and resulted in widespread global acceptance of their version of the story about Palestine…is to say nothing about Jews in general, contains no stereotypes, does not degrade or condemn on religious grounds. It is legitimate political criticism, nothing more.

A crucial aspect of this debate that many folks often unfortunately gloss over is that millions of Jewish anti-Zionists (Jewish folks both within Israel and around the world who oppose the Zionist actions and nature of the current Israeli government) have argued for decades that Israeli policies toward Palestine and Palestinians fly flagrantly in the face of Jewish teachings about compassion toward neighbors. As is famously written in the Torah, “When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger” (Zionists are fond of citing the Torah as their deed to the lands of Judea and Samarra—present day Palestine—but they aren’t often fond of bringing up this little scriptural restriction on oppression, which according to Michael Lerner, is actually the most frequently stated mitzvah, or command, in the entire Torah.)

The argument is that Israel, in adopting Zionist policies, is actually doing the Jewish faith a disservice by oppressing others in the name of Judaism, and that present Israeli policies toward Palestine will prove to be, in the long run, bad for Judaism and bad for Jews. In his essay, “The Israel Lobby,” Lerner writes, “Israel will some day face a reckoning from Arab states and from the peoples of the world for the gross arrogance and insensitivity of their government’s policies, and people will some day look back at the Israel Lobby in the U.S. and realize that it was destructive to Israel’s survival interests.”

YOU DO THE MATH

Final numbers have been tabulated by B’Tselem. Throughout 2007, the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians resulted in 386 deaths. Thirteen Israelis and 373 Palestinians perished. Of the 13 Israelis killed, six were soldiers. Of the seven Israeli civilians killed, two were killed by Qassam rockets, and three were killed by the year’s only Palestinian suicide bombing. Of the 373 Palestinians killed, 242 died with guns in their hands, and 131 were civilians.

Happy New Year.

THE BIG NEWS

Speaking in Jerusalem after meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, President Bush, on 10 January, publicly called for “an end to the occupation that began in 1967.” This is indeed some of the boldest language used by an American president since Carter to call for Palestinian statehood, but it’s still just language. He merely said something, and all the mainstream media are making a big stink. Let’s see him do something.
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1. See Robert Fisk’s “Holocaust and genocide,” published in 2000 in The Independent. The term holocaust originally referred generally to a genocide or mass killing, but now belongs solely to the 6 million Jews of Europe killed by Hitler. By popular understanding, the scope of the term (those who are considered victims of the Holocaust) curiously excludes the 5-6 million non-Jews killed by Hitler’s regime. Winston Churchill in 1920 used the term to refer to the Armenian Genocide, which, 91 years after the fact, is still being denied in some very significant circles.